Check out this article in Business Week Online. It’s about a well-intentioned company being suckered by an evil web designer who registered their domains in his name, and then made off without satisfactorily completing their sites. To date, the company is stuck with two websites that cannot be updated and paints a poor reflection of their business.
I found this story quite disturbing, especially since I’ve actually met a designer who operates like this. The argument is whether the designer or design team should be allowed to register the domain names under their ownership.
At World Wide Creative, we made two critical decisions a few years back:
- There would be no contractual agreement over an extended period. Should a client, for whatever reason, want to leave, they could do so.
- Our clients own the domains.
I cannot understand what makes someone want to lock an unhappy client into a contract. Imagine a restauranteur having guests and then locking them in the restaurant after they complained. Surely, if the relationship goes sour for any reason you’d want to let them leave, if they chose to?
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One Comment
It amazes me that companies still fail to ensure they have complete ownership of their sites. Like WWC I always insist that clients register their own details so that everything is totally owned by them.
Linked to this I had a meeting with a client last week who it transpired had all their domains registered in their web developers name, plus the hosting etc. They’re not even a tinpot little company - something like 10M a year turnover. Needless to say, there was much scurrying for phones after the meeting.
Andy