Does your website belong to you?
Before starting Hot Lizard Designs, my own experience with web designers was mixed, and this was back in the day when Facebook was only just starting to become popular!
Experience One: I had a portable cocktail bar business and wanted a website to establish credibility and accept online enquiries for events. The first design was with a local designer. It was simple and colourful and did the job, i.e. an online presence with basic company details and services.
After 2 years and as my business grew, I wanted a more refined look with more pages. As the original designer had moved on, I went with a highly recommended local website design agency.
With a team of designers, a designated client contact, professional photo shoot, and discussing my business and site design with the head of the company, I certainly felt like I was moving up to the next level with my site - the fee certainly reflected that!
However, I didn’t have the flexibility to update my own site with new menus, past events or galleries - everything had to go back through the agency. And those changes were expensive.
The beauty of Squarespace was / is that the platform itself is easy to use, and gives you the flexibility to make changes to existing content and add new pages and functionality, e.g. blogs, e-commerce, so your website evolves with your business.
Experience Two: I was working for a small business who initially had a simple static website built by a website designer. Over the years employees with some IT experience added to the site. This created a site with multiple styles, no clear navigation or branding, even flashing images!
The company was moving into offering online courses and wanted their website to accept online enrolments and payments to reduce the admin burden on staff. This was the opportunity to create a brand new website and this is when I discovered Squarespace as part of my research into website platforms.
With Squarespace your brand guidelines are set, so if you add a new page and start to add headings, paragraphs, buttons, new blog posts or even products, they will all match the existing style .
Experience Three: A client was making the move away from their current website design agency to Squarespace for more flexibility. The website design itself went smoothly, and then it was time to update the domain name settings so that the domain name would point to the new website. We found out that not only was the domain name hosted on the previous designer’s server, the domain name itself was registered under their company name, and not the business owner’s name.
This is a precarious situation - without legal ownership of your domain name you could have issues with managing email accounts, renewing your domain name, or even transfer your domain name ownership to someone else if you sell your business. There’s also the issue if your relationship with your website design agency sours - how amenable are they if you decide to move to another website designer? In the example above, it took over 3 weeks to get the original website design agency to release the domain name and update the ownership details.
This is why we always recommend hosting your domain name through a third party provider, e.g. GoDaddy. Not only are you in full control, you are only paying the $20 - $30 / year hosting fee, and have the flexibility to change website platforms or even website designers in the future.
These days there are plenty of platforms where small business owners can design their own websites. Some look great, others need a helping hand to get them to where they need to be. And with the ease of access and latest technology, there’s no reason why any small business shouldn’t have a great website.
We are Squarespace specialists precisely because it allows our clients to easily make updates or add new content while maintaining the brand look. You don’t need a degree in software engineering to make those updates, and we ensure all our clients have full access and ownership of their website. After all, it’s part of their business.
Website design isn’t for everyone, but having the option to make changes as your business evolves and having full control over your own website is.