By DAVID A. CHAUVIN //
For a brief moment in 2010, my wildest dreams came true: The Dallas Cowboys ceased to exist.
At least, www.dallascowboys.com did. This unfortunately had nothing to do with football (though, the New York Giants have since won a Super Bowl and the Cowboys continue to blunder both on the field and off, so I shouldn’t be too disgruntled).
Instead, it was a very careless, very understandable mistake that serves as a case study for understanding the nuances of your most important digital asset: your website.
Contrary to popular belief, a website is not an asset you own. To establish an Internet presence, organizations register a domain name with a hosting provider (such as GoDaddy.com) and pay a fee for its exclusive rights. Someone forgot to renew the Cowboys’ subscription to www.dallascowsboys.com, and their website was suddenly, infamously erased from the Internet.
This happens all the time, to businesses of all sizes. What you can and should own are the components that make up the website: the design, the content and the code. Dallas did, and coupled with the team’s powerful resources, the franchise was able to quickly recover from a potentially devastating fumble.
This unfortunately is not the case for most websites. Most organizations don’t have the resources and leverage of the Dallas Cowboys. Too often, the website designer/webmaster ends up owning these components, and requires organizations to pay licensing fees to access their own content – which is housed in the designer’s content-management system, on the designer’s servers.
That is lunacy.
David Chauvin: You’ve got to own it.
How can it be that a public school district, municipality or private company doesn’t have access to its own files? This effectively keeps organizations hostage, requiring them to ask their website manager for permission to access their own content or upload new content to their own website.
Or worse, it holds the content and the organization’s digital presence for ransom – useful, if the customer decides to switch venders.
Let’s be clear: This isn’t always the act of nefarious web-design companies looking to hustle organizations that don’t know any better. It’s written into federal copyright laws that the creator of the website’s design and content automatically becomes the legal owner of those assets.
But organizations need to be wary of the fine print written into their contracts – and make sure it’s clearly stipulated that they, too, have ownership.
Unless the designer states otherwise in the fine print, a file uploaded to your website is no longer yours. Cleaning up your hard drive? Better think twice about deleting that video, since you can’t just pull it off your website.
As recently as this month, we and our strategic partners have seen instances where public entities lost everything – newsletters, PDFs, videos, pictures, analytics, domain names, customer information, subscriber lists, much more – when they terminated web services with their website provider, because the fine print stated it was their responsibility to download and/or copy any information they wished to migrate to a new website service.
Most organizations don’t realize this is the case until it’s too late. And it’s often the case when a web designer offers a “proprietary platform” or a “proprietary content-management system” – buzzwords to watch out for when entering a website-creation agreement.
Jerry Jones: Owning the mistake.
Essentially, this is where a design company suggests that it will build a website at below-market cost by giving you a cookie-cutter site that they own, not you.
Why does this matter? In the short term, you can create a low-cost website – but it will end up costing an exorbitant amount in the long run, either reputationally (when you’re forced to maintain a stale, outdated website) or financially (when you have to pay to build a brand-new website from scratch), or both.
Aside from the effort and resources required to build a new website, there are also tangible detriments when you lose rights to your old site. If you’re forced to re-register your domain name, for instance (or register for a new one, since your former web manager owns the existing one), you will need to rebuild your SEO credibility from scratch. Don’t be surprised if your website goes overnight from the top of Google to the back pages – search engines now see a new, unproven entity.
When website developers hold clients’ content close to the vest, they’re also likely to keep the website’s performance unnecessarily inaccessible. We’ve seen several instances where website managers and advertising managers either erase or refuse to hand over website analytics and advertising performance metrics to clients. This should be unacceptable.
When engaging a web designer, the first thing to discuss is ownership. Ask whether you can take the website with you if you exit the agreement. If not, you’re likely leasing space in the designer’s proprietary system – and you’ll lose your web presence once you end your lease.
Make sure your website designer allows all content – even if it’s written by them – to be owned by you after project completion. It pains me to say it, but take a lesson from Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys: Never relinquish ownership. Never give up control of your content.
David A. Chauvin is executive vice president of ZE Creative Communications.
