Yes, you have rights when it comes to your website. And yes, this includes creative control and copyright ownership.
But we also believe every website owner deserves fundamental agency and understanding in the website process—not just the initial design stages, but in ongoing updates, content creation, security, and overall ability to go in there and take a look around.
In fact, it’s one of the many things that sets Deckard & Company apart as a Bradenton small-business web designer and boutique digital marketing agency: We don’t just do things for our clients. We partner with them. We educate them as needed. And we provide them with the information, tools, and even one-on-one instructions when it comes to monitoring their site and even making updates and corrections.
This isn’t just an option you can request from Deckard & Company. We actively encourage your understanding and participation. We want small business owners to understand the basic layout of your website, the behind-the-scenes functions, and we even want you to be able to go in there and control your own site as needed.
Maybe it looks like we work website magic. But unlike other designers, we want our clients to know exactly what’s happening with every trick we perform.
The Typical Web-Design Smoke Screen
Nine times out of 10, when we take over a website that a third party has designed, our new client has no idea what all has been going on behind the scenes. The site might look pretty good on the home page, and it might even be generally navigable for visitors.
But our new clients, the website owners, have a few adjustments they’d like to make. There are some things they can see that need to be fixed. But no, they tell us, they don’t know how to access the CMS. They don’t know who their host is. They don’t know what services they’ve been paying for.
And when we finally get to the back end, we can see why the previous designer didn’t want anyone else back there. Because goodness gracious we have encountered some real web design catastrophes created by so-called “pros.”
What Goes Wrong on a Website’s Back-End
As important as it is for a small-business website to have a beautiful and intuitive, well-designed user experience, there’s even more going on behind-the-scenes that powers a site and makes it easy to update.
Or not.
When web designers don’t know what they’re doing, they rely first and foremost on fancy, premade site templates. These can look great at the beginning, but there are quite a few problems with them:
- First off, you’re just not getting anything original. Depending on where your “designer” got the template, there could be hundreds or even thousands of other sites out there with the exact same look—including some of your competitors.
- Templates have to be fully integrated within a CMS as well as your website host. If one of these other entities makes a change or an update that doesn’t fully support your website’s template, then whoops, that portion of your site stops working. (Or worse still, the whole site crashes.)
- If your designer is using a template they don’t fully understand, then they sure as hell don’t know how to fix it when one of these problems arises.
- Want something just a little different? See above. Your designer will say it can’t be done because they don’t know how to do it. Or they’ll throw something in there—probably a plug-in—to do one little thing. And then that plug-in fails because it’s yet another entitiy that isn’t perfectly in sync with your site’s template.
And plug-ins are a whole other thing. Don’t get me wrong, website plug-ins are tremendously useful. But you need to know what you’re doing to pick the right one and use it properly so it doesn’t cause more problems than it’s worth.
I recently came across a site that had more than a dozen disused plugins just hanging around it’s backend. It was like a plug-in junkyard. What a mess. And how are you supposed to fix anything, or even know what you’re working with, when you’ve got all of that crap just heaped around back there?
Your Rights: Why You Need Access to Your Own Site
So if someone won’t give you access to your own site, that’s a red flag. You should have all of your information written down, and you have the right to go in there and make changes if you want to.
You have the right to know what all your website designer/manager is doing, and how they plan to address issues of integration when it comes to all of these disparate online parts.
You have the right to a website designer who’s going to be transparent about their process, and you have the right to a professional who can see the whole system, not just one little piece at a time.
Deckard & Company. All Rights Reserved.