Who owns your asset?

Asset: noun
1. a useful and desirable thing or quality
2. a single item of ownership having exchange value.

Your domain name is an asset. Your domain name represents your business name (in many cases), links to your website, your company products and services, and/or your online store.

Who owns your asset?

You should.

So many people delegate the responsibility of designing and publishing their website to a web designer or web design company. For many reasons, some people and companies also delegate the full responsibility of their domain (asset) and their hosting account to their web designer. Some business people do this because they don't understand, don't want to be bothered with the details, or don't know what the risks are.

Your domain account shows who is listed as the owner of your domain name(s) and who are listed as administrator and technical contact. It also controls the settings for where your email and website are hosted.

When delegating the control of your domain (your asset), you may want to consider the benefits of delegating vs the benefits of your maintaining ownership control.

When you give full delegation to an outside person, web designer or company:

This person has sole access to the account where the domain name was purchased. Many web designer have a reseller account with domain registrars (ie, GoDaddy, Network Solutions etc.) and they purchase your domain for you, but keep it in their account base. They maintain full control and have the only password access to the account. Any changes are in the total control of this web designer.

This may sound good from a delegation viewpoint, however, consider this:

(1) If your web designer is a sole proprietor, and something happens to them (accident, illness, death), how will you obtain access to your asset? If they have maintained full control, you may wait months or years, or never obtain the access information. If your web designer is a member of a company, hopefully the company will have this information for you.

One company experienced this problem. They had been working with the same person for years who took care of anything internet for them. Unfortunately this person was the victim of a car accident which then left all of his clients without any access to their web accounts. We were able to work with this company and the registrar of their domain name to prove their actual ownership. Even so, it took legal assistance and months to finally gain access and ownership to the domain
account and we had to rebuild their entire website. Another customer was not as lucky and had to purchase another domain name and wait out the expiration of their company domain name.

(2) If you want for any reason, to change your services to another web designer/company, you will have to request access to your asset.

Unfortunate real life examples:

(a) One company was experiencing dissatisfaction with their web designer and wanted to make a change. When they asked for access to their domain account, they were suddenly presented with a $1000 bill for unpaid services. The invoice was no more specific that that. No amount of communication would clear up what unpaid services related to this $1000. Only after paying the $1000 did they receive a transfer of ownership of their domain name to them and received the password.

The problem, however wasn’t over when, once they accepted ownership of their domain the web designer took down their website from the internet. The web designer gave an excuse why she couldn’t transfer the hosting account to them and it was weeks before they received any web files from this web designer. Fortunately for this company, we were able to capture and download many of their web pages and files prior to the crash of their site. This way they had a representation of their website within days while their full site was being fully rebuilt. This method is not always possible. Some web designers prevent web pages from being captured, or the source file being read.

(b) Another company requested and waited months for access to their domain and hosting account. During their wait, their website remained out of date and they were unable to make any changes to it. Once they received their domain name account, they found that their domain name had expired. It was fortunate for them that they were still able to re-purchase it.

Recently I gave a presentation to a business group, and heard even more stories like these. I also heard how many of the successful business owners had no idea how little control they actually had over their asset or their web presence.

There are honest web designers who maintain control of their clients assets and they have long term mutually beneficial relationships. There are other web designers who maintain their clients by holding them hostage through the control of their assets.

And there are web designers who work with their clients and the client maintains control and grants them technical access to do all that is needed. In our experience, it is this type of designer who works on a customer satisfaction platform.

If you aren’t sure who is listed as the ownership of your domain account, you can check at www.whois.net

You will see something similar to this:

A sure fire way to know how much control you or your designer have is to ask them for your account log in and password information. Remember your domain name is YOUR asset.

Register Your Domain Name Here


Free Domain With Annual Hosting Plan!

Google-friendly website

Do you know that you can be blacklisted from GoogleTM search results?

The following is excerpted from GoogleTM webmaster materials:

Google's aim is to give users the most valuable and relevant search results. Sites' positions in Google search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results. Therefore, GoogleTM frowns on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users re-directing them to sites other than the URL they selected, (used significantly in the pornography industry), sites with numerous inbound links created by link popularity schemes or sites that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Google may take action on such sites making use of these deceptive practices, including removing these sites from the Google index.

GoogleTM quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but GoogleTM may respond negatively to other misleading practices (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't identified in the webmaster guidelines that Google approves of it.

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on GoogleTM.
Beware of claims to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with GoogleTM, or advertise a "priority submit" to GoogleTM. There is no priority submit for GoogleTM.

Use of deceptive or misleading content on your website, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index.

Avoid companies with sales pitches that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines.

Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

For more information about improving your site's visibility in the GoogleTM search results, we recommend reviewing GoogleTM webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website.

Robots.txt file

When optimizing a Web site, remember to utilize the power of the robots.txt file.

Your robots.txt should be a list of files and pages within your web site that you want the search engines to find and which ones you don’t want them to find (Disallow), such as confidential pages, or product download pages.

You must also be aware that your robots.txt file is a public file and anyone can access it once you publish it. So to protect pages and files you don’t want accessed, I recommend you place them in a separate folder, and then you can place the disallow command in your robots.txt file, ie :

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

You need a separate "Disallow" line for every URL prefix you want to exclude.

If every page on your website is to be visited, you can list each one a separate line (recommended), or you can easily make a single two line command:

User-agent: *
Disallow: (put nothing here)

You need to put the robots.txt file in your main directory, the same one where you have your home page, in order for it to be located.

If you use web analytics or traffic reporting programs, these programs will tell you how many times your robots.txt file was accessed.

This is just one more piece of information that helps to keep you website searchable.

A free tool to create a robots.txt file is available at:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

I do recommend that after creating the file, you manually check it for accuracy before publishing it with your website.

Wishing you awesome and continuing success

Make it easy

Your website is one of your best tools to help you solve your customer's problems.

Your home page design is critical to capturing your visitors interest and loyalty. Just because there are so many fun things you can now do on the web, doesn’t make them appropriate for every website.

A few items that irritate visitors and ways to correct them:

(1) Music or voice that automatically launches when you land on the home page.
If your visitor is listening to their own music on their computer, or they have several windows open at the same time, an interference of your beautiful music or sales pitch may aggravate more than inspire. Give them a place to click where they have a choice to listen or not.

(2) Long flash intro with no way out.
This is similar to the automatic launch of music. Most people have limited time to accomplish a task and if your website takes extra time to show your movie EVERYTIME they visit your website, they may not wait for the ending credits and they may not come back. Don’t hold them hostage. Give them a place to click to skip the intro and get to the information or product they are looking for.

(3) Difficult to find instructions and hyperlinks on your home page can send a visitor running. Make your home page attractive, easy to read with navigation and text links that are easy to find and understand.

Visitors to your site are either looking for an answer, a product or service to buy, information to learn, a cause to join. Make it easy and welcoming for them.

Plan your website, and especially your home page from the eyes of your prospect/customer and you will find more of the results you want from your visitors.

Popular Website Mistakes

Designing a productive website is more than just putting text on the internet. Experienced web designers and internet marketers have experienced why certain components are important in making your website the most visitor friendly.

Some of the glaring errors that show up too often, which make your website appear to be unprofessionally designed:

(1) Using text in your images. This makes your text hard to read on certain browsers and your cannot be indexed or searched, therefore not search engine friendly.

(2) Using text that is under 9pt in size. If its too hard to read – people won’t even try.

(3) Your links aren't clearly labeled, don't tell your visitors where they'll end up. The only say "Click Here."

(4) Website navigation needs to be consistent. Inconsistent navigation confuses your visitor.

(5) Too many colors, too many sizes and too may font designs in the same text area.

(6) Too many typos. An occasional typo is usually accepted, however, having someone other than the designer proofread for spelling, grammar, capitalization and content is time and money well spent.

(7) Background graphics or solid backgrounds that don't contrast well against the text, making it hard to read.

(8) Dead links, link rot and/or no 404 pages. Custom 404 pages help you to maintain visitors that typed one of your page names in error, or clicked on a dead link in your site. Your custom 404 page should appear consistent with your site image and have the same navigational links to help your visitor find their way to the live page they are looking for.

(9) Contact pages without live email addresses or contact forms. If you visitor is looking to contact you via email, make it easy for them by making your email a live link, instead of text in a static graphic. Fill in forms are handy to help them tell you what they need, and to protect your email one more level away from being harvested by spammers (this is no guarantee however and spammer software continues to get more sophisticated.)