It’s happened again. I’m helping another business owner who isn’t the registered owner of their own name. This time, like the others, should end well, but after much hassle. I have heard of horror stories where the rightful domain name owner has had to find another name and move on.

I can’t tell you how many times this has happened. A customer wants to hire me and move their site only to find that the person they hired to *do everything* for their website has registered the domain name(s) in their own name, not their customers.

If you haven’t registered your website name yet, take a minute and do it yourself. Go to GoDaddy.com, Register.com or any of a thousand other reputable registrars and buy your domain name. They will probably try to sell you upgrades and other stuff, but all your really need to do is register your domain name in your name. GoDaddy charges less than $11.00 a year for this.

If you already have a website name see who is listed as the administrative contact.
There are many sites that will tell you this, like http://cqcounter.com/whois/
If you are not listed as the administrative contact, write to who is there and let them know you want it changed.

Once you are the administrative contact you are in charge. Any time you or someone else tries to move or change ownership of your site you will get a request for approval. It’s just as important to make sure the contact information for you is always current so you get those requests.

Read more about Controlling Your Domain

I noticed a discussion on LinkedIn today about whether you blogs URL should look like this www.myblog.blogspot.com or like this www.mydomain.com/blog.

Some people couldn’t understand the difference and others didn’t think that it mattered. Well, there is a difference and it does matter.

The Difference…
When you are looking to see who owns a website the only part of the domain name that tells you who the site belongs to is the part that comes right before the .com (.org, .net, etc.).
That means that if your URL looks like…
MyDomainName.Blogspot.com
or
Blogspot.com/MyDomainName
that page is on the Blogspot website.

If your URL looks like this…
Blogspot.MyDomainName.com
or
MyDomainName.com/Blogspot
that content is on your site and you have complete control over it (or you should)

Why It Matters…
The old saying with SEO used to be “Content Is King” and while that may not be as true as it used to be, new content on your site is still very important for a couple of reasons and it’s true for human visitors as well as the search engines.

First, you need to have words on your site that the search engines can find, read and then know what your site is all about. The more words that you have on your site the more chance that someone will find you. Sometimes for things that you would not have even considered. I’ve mentioned before that if you are lucky enough to get good relevant comments on your posts, that’s even more content for your site that you don’t even have to write.

Next, one of the many factors that search engines use when rating your site is how often that you add new content. They do this because they think (like your human visitors) “all right I’ve seen their site, why would I go back again?”
You would probably only go back more than once or twice if there was something new to look at each time that you did. So, the more times that you add new content the better that you should rank.

You have worked very hard to

• Write new content on a regular basis
• Passed along your knowledge and insights
• Have others add even more in the way of comments

Why would you put this on someone else’s site and let them have all the benefits without any of the work?

There are also a few reasons why you shouldn’t have a blog on your site

Read Should My Business Have A Blog?

I was working on a site for a new customer and they asked for a contact form on their site. Not a big deal, it’s something that I have done dozens of times before. This time I did something that made me quite embarrassed.

Let me start by saying that when I design a site for a new customer I usually start in a private folder inside my site. I usually design the first page only. I’ll get some idea of what they are looking for, then put up a page or two for the client to review. They can ask for changes and then I’ll put up another first page or two. This process keeps repeating until the client is satisfied then I can put up the rest of the site pretty quickly.

This does two things that I like. First the client gets to see what I’m doing before they have to send me any money. I have many clients that I have never met in person and several have been burned by designers who took their money and never delivered what the customer really wanted. This way they see that I am going to deliver something that they will be happy with, then after they pay me I move it to their domain name. Because these pages are on my site I get more control over the site itself until the client does actually pay me. It’s not infallible, but what is?

Today we got past that point and the client wanted to see the rest of the site. Because it was still on my site I just started putting up the rest of the pages using the first page as a template. That brings me to the contact form. I decided that the form was probably not going to be used until we actually moved the site to the customers domain. I set up the form and when I got to the form action section I just typed in x.com and moved on, not thinking about the repercussions of that. I told the customer that the form wasn’t set up to work yet, but they went ahead and tried it anyway. When they did they were redirected to a porn site. I felt like a hack.

My advice is to do what I say and not what I do and TEST EVERYTHING before you post your work. I also got the idea to add this story to my blog when I read this post.

20 Best Blog Post Ideas for Small Business Blogging

A new customer asked me the other day “Oh! One more question….so you’re doing my hosting and all that. What happens if you win the lottery and move to Tahiti? Do I only have to find a new host, or what?”

I often wonder why my customers don’t ask that question much more often. After all I am a one man shop. I replied to them.

You have the best!
A free open source platform that will always be available to everyone.
That’s why I insist on it.
This is your site. I suggest that you learn to back up the data yourself.
If you have a backup and you have control of your domain name you can easily move it somewhere else.

That’s one of the reasons that I recommend that all of my customers keep control of their own domain name, use open source software and keep their own backups. If something were to happen to me they could move their site somewhere else and there would be many other people who could easily step in and help them.

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I have a section of my website called “Starting your own website”. One of the things that I believe is that freely sharing information is one of the best ways to succeed in almost any online venture. So I made a tutorial on how anyone can make their own site and host if for less than $100.00 a year.

The thing that I hear from people who want their own site is that they just don’t have any idea where to start. So lesson 1 is “Where do I start”.

I advise anyone who is just starting their own site is to register their domain name. Most people who are in business prefer a domain name that ends with .com
You can have many other extensions, but .com is the one that most visitors will look for when they look for a business. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it does seem to be the way that it is.

Getting your name is easy and should be the first thing that you do when starting a site. You go to a registrar (I use DoDaddy.com) and find a name that is not already taken and register it. The hard part here is to find one that is still available. GoDaddy charges $8.95 a year so the investment is small.

The way it works is that all Internet addresses are not actually names, but a series of numbers. So when you go to your web browser and type in Lillicotch.com the nameservers at GoDaddy tells it that my website is at IP Address: 209.67.52.207 and sends you there. If something were to happen and I needed to move my site I can simply put the files up at a new host and then tell GoDaddy that. They will stop sending visitors to the old address and to go instead to the new one.

The important thing here is to do this yourself. Many busy business people outsource their site design and there’s nothing wrong with that, but on the web your domain name is what controls everything else and if you give away control of your name you give away control of everything. This way if something happened to your host or if someone hijacked your site as long as you controlled your name you could just move it somewhere else and start over.

More…

I have written before about keeping your domain name up to date and today I have a customer who is having trouble with transferring his website to another server.

My customer is a Polka and Jazz artist named Al Meixner. Al hired me to update his site and to give it a more consistent look and feel. Al had originally put his site on Enter.net and since his hosting agreement was about to expire he wanted to move his new site to a new web host as well.

He wrote an email to the proper department requesting a nameserver change and nothing happened. Then a second and third request. His original request was July 30 and as of this moment (Thursday Aug 2 at 9:00 AM) it still hasn’t changed.

My recommendation is to use a domain name host that is well known and stable that allows you to make changes yourself. I use GoDaddy and they seem fine for me although I have heard a few horror stories. No matter which domain registrar who you choose, check them out well first because in the end the only thing that you really have is your name.

If you don’t have access to it to easily make changes to your domain look for someone else right now, because your current host could also make moving your name to another host difficult as well and it may take some time.

More…

I subscribe to Matt Cutts’ blog and so I wasn’t surprised to read this morning that it was hacked and replaced by a group called “Dark SEO Team”. I’m not sure if all of his pages are gone or not, but it got me to thinking about security and information backup issues. Then just by coincidence I got an e-mail from someone who had almost hired me, but went with someone else. They told me that their webmaster had quit and was “not sure” if he could remember all of their passwords to give them.

Imagine that, your web person leaves you and no one in your organization has a backup of the data or a copy of your passwords! How to fix that is quite the question, but the best solution is not to allow yourself to be put in that position in the first place. Many web designers and developers will offer or insist on doing everything for you. That can be a big problem if they decide to leave and you don’t know what they have done.

Rule 1 – Keep control of your domain name yourself.
In the end it’s all you have. Your domain name host tells the nameservers on the web where to point to when people look for your site. So in the worst case scenario if you can’t get into the host who has your website files you can always buy a new web host put up a new site and have your name servers point there instead.

Rule 2 – Make sure that there is more than one person who knows all of your passwords.
Getting passwords changed without knowing your current one can be a big hassle. Maybe even keep them with your backup information in a secure location.

Rule 3 – Backup, backup, backup
It can be some trouble to backup on a regular basis so if you don’t do this now you should look into one of the many automated solutions that are available. Also you should keep at least one copy in a different location.

Here are some good tips for backing up your data for everyone, not just business owners, from Leo Notenboom on his AskLeo site.

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I always tell my customers to keep their domain name themselves. That if something should happen to me and I am no longer able to help them with their site that they can always go to their domain name host and just point it to a copy of their site on another web host that they can control. That way even if someone hijacks your site you can get it back.

I think that at the very least all website owners should have control of their own names. It has been said that the search engines now look at how long a domain name is registered for as an indication of how stable the site is. For example a domain registered for a year is more likely to be gone in a year than a name registered for nine years. Normal visitors can’t easily see that information, but search engines can incorporate that info into their algarythms. I don’t know if this is true or not, but what do you have to lose?

It’s also very important to keep your contact information with your domain host current. They will usually notify you if there is something wrong or if it is about to expire. There are many people who will buy an expired domain right away just to get any benefit from their established traffic, so you can be assured that if you let your domain name expire you won’t be able to easily get it back. Here’s an example where a church had let their domain expire and had it grabbed up by a porn site.

More…