Whether setting up your own website or hiring a web designer to handle the process for you, make sure you own your own site and know exactly where to locate all the important account usernames and passwords.
If you decide to move to a different web designer, you’ll be glad that you have organized your website documentation.
Do yourself a favour and keep up-to-date records of all website documentation in one place. Here is a free download to help you out.
What every Website owner needs to know:
Domain registration
In your Essentials document include a link to the domain registration company, the email address and password used to login to the account, and the renewal date. NOTE: Be sure you are listed as the domain registrant NOT your web designer. The email address connected with the registration needs to be yours, not your web designer’s and it must be an active email account. Don’t ignore emails from the domain registration company informing you that it’s time to renew your domain name.
Web Hosting account
In your Website Essentials document include the name of your hosting company, the URL of your web-based control panel, username and password. Keep track of when your hosting is due for renewal. If you have it set to auto-renew ensure that you update the credit card expiry date when you are issued a new credit card.
Know your FTP (file transfer protocol) credentials, including your FTP host name, login username and password.
Hosting Support – Know where and how to login or call to get support from your host company, put this information in your Website Essentials document. Your web designer may be away on vacation when the host decides to upgrade their servers causing problems for your site. You don’t want to wait two weeks to resolve your problem!
WordPress admin login credentials
If your website has been built in WordPress make sure that you have full access as a site administrator. Many WordPress developers don’t give the keys outright to the site owner for fear that they will break something on the site. If something were to happen to your web developer you would be stuck. It’s your web site, know what the full-access login information is.
Own your images
If you want to hire a different web designer to create a new look for your site you’ll need to locate original image files. Have your own copies in a safe place. Computers and external hard drives crash, files are lost. Make sure that you have backups of all important files off-site. You can never have too many backups.
- Logo – have a full electronic version of your logo in the dropbox. It should ideally be in a vector format (like Adobe Illustrator or EPS) on a transparent background, to ensure the greatest design flexibility.
- Stock images – Any images that you’ve purchased (or that your web designer purchased on your behalf) for use on your site need to be backed up to your dropbox folder.
- Professional Profile Photos – Backup to dropbox any images that will be costly to replace.
- Font files – did you purchase a font for use in your logo or other promotional materials? If so back it up too
Take back the ownership of your website. A little organization can save you money, time and frustration.
