I would have to say that 99 per cent of my clients who come to me wanting their existing website overhauled or redone are unable to give me the login to their website domain names. This is indicative of an age-old issue whereby web developers held their clients to ransom as it were, by purchasing the domain names for their clients in their own names.

A domain name is something like melaniephillibert.com – this is the address that your visitors type in to bring up your website online. Quite a few of my clients did not realise that their domain name and their website can “live” in two separate places, and very often do. For example, a domain name can be purchased at say GoDaddy.com or Namecheap.com and the website can be hosted in the cloud or with BlueHost, or Hostgator, to name a few. The hosting company names given are not recommended, but rather used as an example only.

The way that the domain or name of your site is connected to your website is by the DNS settings. DNS is short for Domain Name System (or server) and you simply specify which DNS server is used, or which IP address should be used for a particular domain.

I think by now you can see that for a website owner not to have control over his/her own domain registrar is a big mistake. You would not go into a car dealership to purchase a car and then put the car in the name of the deale,r would you? Then why would you allow a web developer to hold the access to your domain registrar login for your new website?

Once I have found the appropriate name for a client’s new website, I always hand them the information with a step-by-step guide on how to register and let them take this step using their payment information. This will ensure that when the domain comes up for renewal they will be notified and any information pertinent to their domain will be sent directly to them. This is a must for your own protection and peace of mind.

Web hosting

This type of activity is not restricted to domain names, however. Many business owners do not have the login to their web hosting and a large percentage are not really sure where their websites are being hosted.

Web hosting is the service providing space on the Internet for websites. When you make a website and want other people to see it, you will need to publish (or upload) it with a web hosting service. So essentially, this is where the files and important information that make up your website will “live”.

Even if you have no clue what to do inside your hosting account, and it all looks like Greek to you, you should be able to login or hand the login to someone who does if you need to.

Again, I insist here, that the hosting account is set up in the name of my client so that they have full access to THEIR web property.

And again, there is the login to the actual back end of your website, or if you have a hotel, villa or apartment, you need to be able to access your booking engine. Although you may require the assistance of professionals for updates to your software, plugins, or images and written content of your website, you should still insist that you have this login access.

The thing is, web design is a very dynamic field and changes are occurring all the time in the elements in the front end and back end of websites. What worked last year may not be the best thing this year, and you need to keep up with the trends so that your website does not become dated.

The most agreed upon figures indicate that there are over 630,000,000 websites on the Internet with over 3.3 billion pages. That’s a LOT of competition.

You want your site to stand on its own in that crowd. Therefore it is important that you as a website owner have full control over your web property.

Melanie Phillibert is a web developer and Internet marketing consultant. A multiple-award-winning online marketer, she has studied Internet marketing and web design/developmnet, SEO, PPC, Spcoa; media management and e-commerce development for the last 10 years. She can be contacted via e-mail at melanie@internetmarketingsynergies.com.