------- Clearing Up the Confusion E-Zine ------- Vol 2, Issue 9 Wow! Once again I got a tremendous response from that last installment of our series on owning your website (and the dangers of not controlling that valuable commodity). Thanks go out, too, to my guest author, Chris Juillet, for his great piece on intellectual property on your site. Check out the archives at http://cyberdatasolutionsllc.com/ezine/ if you missed the first two parts. This time we'll take a look at a few ideas on how to avoid getting in trouble in the first place and what you can do if you discover that you aren't the one in control. Also, on a slighlty related note, if you would be interested in writing a guest article for this newsletter, please contact me. I can't promise that you'll get anything more than public adulation, but that's better than nothing I guess. ---------------------------------------------------------------- In This Issue... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Article: Avoiding the Website Landmines 2. Blog Posts 3. Shameless Self-Promotion 4. The Fine Print ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Article: Avoiding the Website Landmines ---------------------------------------------------------------- Okay, in the first two parts of this series, we talked about the dangers of not controlling your website and some danger signals which might indicate that you are in a less-than-controlling place. Now, how can we avoid getting into trouble in the first place? And if are already in trouble, what can we do? 1. This is a big one, so I'm putting it first: Sign up for your own web hosting service and register your own domain. If you are working with a designer, they may have certain requirements. Ask them to give you a list. Ask if they recommend any particular service. Most hosting services have excellent sales teams who are more than happy to help you walk through the process of signing up. They're just a phone call away. 2. Save the hosting information in a safe and preferrably redundant location. Personally, I keep a copy of my original "welcome" message from my hosting service both in an email folder on my computer *and* in hard-copy in my filing cabinet. This information is about as vital to the health of your company as your bank account numbers. Treat it in the same way. 3. Review the information periodically. This is especially important if you have more than just one person in the company. Once a quarter or so, check that the people listed as the billing, technical, and administrative contacts for your domain are still with the company *and that their contact information hasn't changed.* Is the domain about to expire? How embarrassing (and damaging to the botom line) would it be if a potential customer went to your website only to discover that it wasn't there any more because you forgot to renew the domain? Even worse, what if someone else snagged your domain before you had a chance to renew it? So, what if your site already exists and you didn't create it? What if someone else controls your vital information? You've got a few options, but they will be dependent both on the specifics of your situation and on the goodwill of whomever holds your site information. 1. Very politely ask for your site and domain information. You can present the request as something as simple as you want to have that information just in case something happens to them. It's a valuable piece of your company's operating infrastructure, so it only makes sense that you should have a copy of it, right? If the person in question refuses outright, then you might have a problem. They have you by the throat and there's not much you can do about it unless you choose to take drastic measures. More on that later. Most people will have no problem with the request. The only time they might would be if they are hosting your site themselves. By giving you access to your site, they would also be giving you access to their own site and any others they might be hosting. 2. If you discover that you don't even have anyone to ask, then you've got a different problem. You can use one of the "whois" (http://whois.net/) sites to track down your registrar and hosting service. Unfortunately, the information returned from these services is not standardized in any way, so I can't tell you exactly where the information will be. Once you find out *who* they are, you can then contact those services and request your information. They should have procedures in place which will allow you to do this, though depending on how bad your situation is (the contact person doesn't work for you anymore, you've moved and have a new phone number and a new email address, you don't know the answer to your security question -- "What was the name of Aunt Suzie's pet iguana?") the procedures can take weeks to work through and *may* cost you money to process. 3. If someone is withholding your information despite your repeated *polite* requests. You may have to resort to legal persuasion. I am not a lawyer, though, so I can't advise you on this. You need to consult with someone like Chris Juillet, (http://www.juilletlaw.com/) last month's guest author, a lawyer who speciallizes in intellectual property. 4. If all else fails you may have to abandon your domain. This is not a step to take lightly. Moving a site to a new domain and hosting service means that you have to start over from nothing. In fact, you are worse off than nothing because you have an established presence at your old location. You will have no way of getting out the information that you've moved to a new online storefront. 5. If you do have to take that last step, you may want to consider registering on one of the domain watch services. These companies offer (for a price, of course) to keep a watch on a domain or domains of your choosing and notify you if they ever become available. Chances are that no one is malicious enough to actively keep your domain away from you, so they probably will let it expire. If they *are* being malicious about it, see #3 about legal steps. That's about all I have on this topic. If you have any questions or comments, please send them along to: gpeters@cyberdatasolutionsllc.com I would love to hear if you've run into any other situations like this and how you managed to solve them. Copyright 2008, Greg Peters ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Blog Posts ---------------------------------------------------------------- Links to posts on the "Clearing Up the Confusion" Blog from the last year: Sunday, February 03, 2008 -- Show Your Colors with iGoogle Themes http://clearing-confusion.blogspot.com/2008/02/show-your-colors-with-igoogle-themes.html "I've written a couple of times now about the custom themes for the iGoogle personal homepage. My favorites include the beach scene (where I swear I saw the Loch Ness Monster at around 3am one night) and the images of different planets...." Tuesday, March 27, 2007 -- When Two Equals Three http://clearing-confusion.blogspot.com/2007/03/when-two-equals-three.html "... I was so proud of myself. I had set up a "to do" list on my personalized Google homepage in order to remember some of the ideas I wanted to cover in the articles I was to write. I had added a recurring event to my "Remember the Milk" calendar, so I'd know which Tuesday I was supposed to be sending out the next issue...." ---------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Shameless Self-Promotion ---------------------------------------------------------------- The "Clearing Up the Confusion" E-Zine is a production of Greg Peters, owner, chief cook, and bottlewasher of Cyber Data Solutions. CDS has been helping website designers develop better web presence for their clients for more than a decade. Visit us on the Web at www.cyberdatasolns.com to see how we can help your webmaster. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 4. 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