We work with many non-techy clients, and that’s okay! That’s what our agency is here for! We enjoy showing our clients the ropes, and we take our time explaining the technical processes along the way.
Most of our clients have been in business for many years, but have only recently started understanding how important it is to have a strong online presence for their businesses. Often times, our clients don’t understand the difference between registering a domain, website hosting packages, emails, and a honey badger. This makes the entire website process pretty intimidating. If we can educate our clients and win their trust, that brings us some really big smiles.
It’s important that the owner of the domain purchases the domain directly. If they don’t, the purchaser of the domain becomes the owner of the domain. So if the web designer purchased the domain for you, guess who shows up as the owner? This is bad. If the web designer disappears you won’t have access to the domain. Even worse, your web designer can hold it hostage and decide to sell it to you for whatever price they want. Why, you might ask? Because they own it instead of you, and you’re now invested with a really expensive website and years of SEO. So you’ll have to either pay them or risk your website coming down and potentially losing your domain name and worse: your website ranking. To prevent something like this from happening we recommend YOU, the owner, purchase the domain directly. This avoids having to ask the web designer later to add you as the owner, or worse having to pay them tons of money for your own domain.
We’ve met several clients with these unfortunate bad stories:
“My web designer registered the domain name for me and is now missing in action. I can’t reach them anywhere and my domain is about to expire.”
“My web designer let the domain name expire and now my competitor just purchased my domain.”
Or worse,
“My web designer wants me to pay him $3,000 for my own domain.”
We’ve heard these horror stories over and over again and highly recommend that you purchase your domain.
Godaddy has a pretty straight forward process for newbies. Make sure you don’t get pressured into purchasing any up-sells that you may not need like SEO local, emails, or website hosting if you’re only purchasing a domain. Do you have a web design story to share?