Are you “really” in control of your website?

John Tully
Owner
Delta Strategic Marketing

If you have a website for your small business or organization, you probably feel pretty much in control of it. You can see it; you can interact with it and it even has your photo on it!  But do you really control it? Let’s review the areas where control can be (and is regularly) lost:

Domain name/domain registration
If your name is John Smith and your website is johnsmith.com you probably feel pretty secure but as small business owners we often delegate tasks to support staff or outsourced help and if one of them registered the domain on your behalf and didn’t use your name – then technically you’re not in control. There have been many cases of domains being held ransom by 3rd parties who haven’t been connected to the website for years.

Also, remember that domains are only ever rented - never purchased outright. The day you stop paying the domain registration fee (or worse, you forget to pay) your domain is back on the block and up for grabs from whoever wants to get it.

Access to content management system (CMS)
Can you make changes, edits and additions freely (whenever you want) to your website? If not (or if it’s really complicated to make changes) then you’re not really in control of your site. And even if you do have access do you know whether you have FULL admin access? Without full admin rights you’re likely restricted to what you can add or change.

Web designers sometimes do this for a very good reason – they don’t want people messing up their hard work, but you may not have the same web designer forever and then it can become a real headache to get back control.

Ownership of content
It’s your website with your name all over it – surely you own all the content? Not necessarily.
When you contract with certain website providers, they take full control of your content of your website and wrap it up with proprietary software that means you can’t take it somewhere else. Many of them even copyright your material as theirs – meaning that you might not even own the material that you supplied to build the website! This includes words/text and pictures/videos – whatever is on your website.

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