Alright, so this week I just wanted to touch quickly on what you need to look for or what you should be prioritizing at least first off when you initially looking for a web developer or you know, someone like Mars Digital or variety of other companies out there or my competitors.
So, there’s kinda 3 things that you really need to look at, and the reason I’m discussing this one now is that, I belong to another Facebook group called Small Business Owners New Zealand.
And in there, someone posted out about a terrible experience they had with a web developer where they basically wanted to move away.
And I had a client, just recently in the same scenario. And they don’t want to hand it over. Even though the website was built specifically for that client, they don’t wanna hand it over, they don’t wanna give them Google Analytics or Google Ads access.
It’s basically them citing that It’s their intellectual property, even though it’s all build on, on something like Google Analytics which is in our Uhmm small quite open source, but it’s a platform that uh technically Google owns.
So that citing intellectual property, And won’t hand over that information or that website and those systems to the client that I’ve been… paying for, effectively , multiple times over.
So, there’s 3 things that you need look at,
The first one is,
• What platform your website will be built on?
If the developers are gonna use a propriety platform that they themselves have built, then they are the only ones that can do anything with it, the only ones that can host it, the only ones that can do any development work on it, and they’re the only ones that will be able to do absolutely anything to it.
Don’t give you access I’m sure to do things like uploading your photos or changing texts but as far as making any structural changes or improvements to it, you are very reliant on them .
And A good example of this is Zealed Crew, I used to work for. They have a platform called Zest.
And this is something that was built using a language compel and it was built specifically by the developers at Zealed. And they are the only ones that know how it works completely. They’re the only ones that can actually get access to it. You can’t migrate the website away from….. , from them, so you are stucked with Zealed while you’re on a Zest website.
And from their point of view, they can lock you in as a client just by having you on Zest because it could be quite expensive for you to go away and build another website.
So, that’s what you need to look out for, propriety platform.
Uhh , the next thing is
• Who owns the rights to that website?
So… if question 1 is a No, i.e. its built on in an open source platform or its not built on their own internal propriety platform then next question is who owns the rights to the site?
Ahh . And in the case of something like Shopify or Squarespace, you don’t own the rights to that website. Shopify and Squarespace own that website.
Ahh and need to do the drill. Its all owned by Shopify and Squarespace you’d pay or the developers paying Shopify and Squarespace a monthly subscription to have the rights to use that software.
When you decide that you need to upgrade your website, Yes sure there’s a variety of people that work on Squarespace, variety of people that work on Shopify, Wix, Weebly, all those open, uhm mul.., there is semi open source platforms. Ahh, but the site itself and the code behind it, is owned by that system.
Then, ..while you have full admin rights to it , you cannot migrate it away and do kind of anything that you want..
Uhhm , now if.. the next step is something like WordPress or Joomla, ahh Concrete5, these are all what’s called pure open source platforms.
And that’s where anyone can do anything on it basically. You can make it do what you want it to do. And we’re presses something that I use for ninety nine percent of the websites we build because we can make it do anything we wand and it is open source so from our clients’ perspectives, If they decide or what happens if Mars Digital does not exist in five years?
Well, here’s a copy of your website… this is, this is your site, you do with it as you are, will you have full admin access? or you have to do to clone it and take it to another host. Ezz basically say I’m cancelling the subscription ,Uhh and that’s a lot easier for the client , ah long term than something like having to completely rebuild.
It also means that with things like security issues and so forth, Ahh we are able to jump on it straight away because we can push that out quite easily, Uhm, but with something like Shopify and Squarespace, they take care of that.
Then the next thing to really look at is,
• Who owns the domain name ?
So when you sign up to a developer who is going to build a website and also going to purchase the domain name, who owns that domain, developers, is the agency purchasing it on your behalf and your name and charging you for that? Or are they purchasing it ?, do they own the domain? and you’re paying them the rights to use that domain.
Because if you don’t have that DNS record access, if you are unable to login and see your domain Ahh to make changes to it, then you’re gonna have to go back to them every single time that you want to do anything.
Say, setting up, Google workplace or setting up a system like Mailchimp or, Sendgrid or one of those email marketing platforms or anything that really requires domain level verification.
You are going to have to go back to your developer and ,.. fifty fifty,, well, I should see this for real more than that..
Chances are that they are going to charge you . So it is very, very , very worth your while to make sure who owns that domain whether you have access
Are you listed? As the owner of the domain and then as technical .. technical contact or, is it all in their name , and are you gonna have problems in the future?
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