This weekend I got a frantic email from a possible client that I had spoken to earlier last week. This client was unhappy with their current web designer and was interviewing me as a possible replacement. I asked the potential new client if they had ownership of their website and they said that they would check and get back to me.

Apparently, the talk with the old web designer didn’t go very well as the next email and phone call I got was panicked one asking me to please help them. The current web designer didn’t like the fact the client wanted to leave and had started to shut down parts of their various websites…and had threatened to erase them completely.

Now how could something like this happen? While most web designers I know are trustworthy and ethical, unfortunately this is not the first time I’ve witnessed something like this. If you have someone that’s helping you to design or maintain your website, you have to be very careful not to give them absolute control or allow them to own critical parts of your web presence…lest you might find yourself in the same situation as my unfortunate prospective client.

Here are some tips on how to keep control of your website:

1. Always purchase your own domain names- Never, ever allow anyone except yourself to purchase the domain name(s) for your website. Some designers will offer to buy the domain for you as a “convenience”. Don’t let them! It’s a simple matter for them to name themselves as the owner of the domain name which will make it impossible for you to do anything with it without going through your designer. That means that if you get into a dispute, then the designer can keep your domain name or refuse to allow you to transfer it over to another web host. You web designer can easily hold your entire website “hostage” this way.

Buying a domain name is not difficult. You can get one at My Namespot Domains in less than five minutes for less than $10 per year. Remember that your domain name is like real estate on the Internet and once someone purchases one, it’s theirs until they decide to give up ownership. Don’t delegate something that important to someone else.

2. Keep track of all your important account information- In most cases, your web designer will need to have access to your web hosting account information, or the log-in to your YouTube account or any kind of account that you might need to allow them access to do their jobs. Just like your domain name account, you need to be the primary contact for all of your online accounts. That means if anything goes wrong, the first person these companies will contact will be you…not your designer.

You also need to keep track of passwords, usernames, account numbers and you need to log on to these accounts on a regular basis to make sure that you have access to them. This will keep your web designer from locking you out of your important accounts in the case of a dispute.

3. Keep a copy of your website in your possession- Even if you’ve hired a professional to maintain your website for you, you should always have an up-to-date copy of your website in a place were you can grab it in an emergency like your computer hard drive, a CD, or a thumb drive. This is a good idea anyway just in case your web host starts having problems and you need to find a new host quickly. But it’s also a good way to keep an unscrupulous web designer from blackmailing you by threatening to shut down your website.

Also, if your website also uses a database of any kind…say your website has an online store like Zen Cart or OScommerce or you’re running a Wordpress blog, make sure that you also have recent backups of those as well…especially if these databases contains customer or financial information of any kind. It’s actually a lot worse to lose this information than it would be to lose your website. You can at least recreate a website…it’s much harder to recover customer information.

Ask your web designer to show you how to retrieve back ups of your website and databases if you have them and start getting backups of your website on at a weekly basis. If your web designer can’t (or won’t, which is a bad sign) show you how to retrieve your backups, contact your hosting company and have tech support show you how to do it.

4. Don’t allow your lack of knowledge get in the way- I’m always giving my own clients and potential prospects this advice and as a rule, I never register domain names or open hosting accounts for my clients, even if they ask me to. Some of the less technically savvy ones are always trying to get me to do stuff like this for them because they don’t want to have to deal with the “technical stuff”. But I always warn them that their lack of technical knowledge is the thing that makes them vunerable to getting ripped-off by someone less than honest.

The bottom line is that if you’re going to have a website, there’s going to be a certain amount of “technical stuff” that you’re going to have to deal with. It comes with the territory. And the more knowledgeable you are about this stuff, the less likely you’re going to be taken by an unscrupulous web designer. This doesn’t mean that you need to turn yourself into a tech nerd. But every small business owner who owns a website should know how to buy their own domain names, open up a web hosting account, open up accounts at YouTube, Facebook, etc, and how to make regular backups of their website. If you know how to do these things…you won’t find yourself in the position of the poor soul I talked to this weekend.

So what do you think? Do you have a web designer horror story you want to share? Leave your tips and stories in the comments section!

P.S. Some time back, I did a telephone interview on how to find and work with a web designer with marketing expert, Connie Green. You can listen to an excerpt of the interview here.