What Your Website Designer May Not Tell You That You Should Know!

Our marketplace has changed significantly over the past 2 or 3 years and while this is not unlike any other industry these changes have had some negative effects on website owners which they may not be aware of.

A great example of this happened to one of our now “sadly departed customers” that had a website stored with us for over 2-3 years. To give you some scope of the customers account with us without giving out too much details they came to us through a great referral source “word of mouth”.

They had issues where they couldn’t get their website updated, contact their hosting provider and more importantly couldn’t guarantee that their website would be available when their customers visited it when with their old provider. They came to us to resolve these issues and that worked well for the 2-3 years they were with us.

They didn’t realize that we also built websites (our fault for not advising them of this), however they did know that we did maintain them and we did complete changes for them over the time. None the less they went website shopping and found a “website design firm” who could build them a website.

After a short period of time (1-2 months) of the new website going live they noticed that they were paying 2 website hosting bills. The website designer had not told them that they would be moving hosting away from our network to the new HOSTED solution for the software they had used to build the new website.

The reason we highlighted HOSTED in that previous paragraph is due to the fact that a HOSTED solution means that the customer HAS to use the website hosting environment supplied by the software vendor to store the website. The website designer had not told the customer about this. What makes this worst is the fact that this means the client, should they have issues with this new website designer, cannot move away from their network without the cost of building a totally brand new website. A crucial fact that was never told to them in the beginning which could cost the client at least $1,000 to remedy should it occur.

In light of this whole event we thought it is a good idea that you as potential customers of any website design firm should have a small list of things to consider before going with a given company who is building your new website. This includes the following:

1. Can you host the website where it currently is (providing you are happy with that provider)?
2. Is the website software being used a hosted solution?
3. If it is a hosted solution, what is its limitations?
4. What software will be used to build the website if it isn’t a hosted solution. This will typically be open source and in something like WordPress and Joomla. If it isn’t then it could be a custom coded ASP .Net script which is ok as well. As long as it can be moved as needed.
5. What is the payment structure for the project?

Should you still be unsure as to what solution best suits your website needs or which one you should go for. Give Suncoast Web Solutions a call and we can guide you through each of your options and advise you on which solution would work best.

Suncoast Web Solutions builds, markets and stores websites for customers using open source solutions which means that you can store their websites on any hosting platform that meets the minimum requirements outlined by the software manufacturers.