Transparency is absolutely the key. Over the years, we’ve had quite a few clients run into similar problems you had mentioned… client comes to us for a website redesign after years of not speaking with their previous provider. Only to find their website domain name wasn’t registered to them in the first place, or that they don’t own the rights to their website. And you can’t fault the client for not knowing better. Especially with copyright issues, most small businesses, and people in general, don’t have a clue. It’s our job to explain things in detail and not gloss over critical issues.

A number of years ago I worked for a large hosting company and registrar, and you wouldn’t believe the number of calls about this. The story was usually the same. The business owner contracted a less than reputable design firm to build them a site. The design company register a domain in their name, built a site, hosted it on their servers or with the hosting company but in the design firms name. Then they took the clients money. Typically they would then disappear or just become unavailable. So, the business owners would be left with no access to their domain or site. In most cases the business owners were able to recover the domain name, but the websites were a bit more difficult. In both cases there was a lot of paperwork and hoops to jump through.

In any case it’s good to see that companies like Formulis are straight forward about who owns the domains and websites they work with. We also make sure that each domain is registered to our clients and that they understand how website ownership works. Transparency is the key.