I am a big fan of The Bivings Report. This is a great blog that demonstrates how an Interactive PR agency can use a blog to create a useful collection of both thought leadership and down-and-dirty practical items. A recent post, Buying a Website. The Seven Costly Questions That Are Often Overlooked, directly addresses a lot of client hosting concerns that are often not voiced.
What Gary Bivings notes in his post matches to what I have frequently experienced. Clients need to take a bit more ownership and responsibiltiy for the details behind campaign projects. By all means I relish in being a trusted advisor. However, clients must always think ahead as to the ownership of their materials.
Here are some additional items to the Bivings post to consider:
Always keep it work for hire. Be sure that you own 100% of the content, design, code and other materials. Not just the end result. If I am paying for materials, I believe the materials along the way have been paid for as well. This means that the design files that make up the Web site should be delivered to me as well as the final Web site.
Example, I recommend any design contract call for the delivery of all Adobe Flash and Adobe Photoshop source files be delivered as part o the site launch.
Know the permitted uses of image and media files. We almost always purchase royalty free or restricted rights images for design efforts. These are purchased for use in the Web site and then are usually not permitted for reuse in other projects. Be sure that if you plan to adapt your Web imagery to other online or offline projects that you obtain the details on the permitted uses of these images. And, that you obtain the images themselves and the details of where they were purchased. By obtaining these details you can edit the image if needed and purchase the additional rights as well.
Have hosting under your control. Almost every agency provides some sort of level of hosting. I recommend against this as a packaged service. Instead I feel clients should contract with the hosting vendor (via the agency is fine) or provide the hosting. The agency can then be provided the appropriate access and contracted for support as needed. The key is that you retain administrative access to and control over the home for your materials. You then will never have to migrate the materials should you sever your relationship with the agency.
Own the domain names. Be sure that when your agency registers domain names that your company is listed as the administrator. The agency can be the technical and even billing contact. However, if you are not the administrator then you are tied to the agency to turn the domain over to you. Eliminate future transfer hassles by owning the domain and the agency acting as your technical contact.
Manage your content. When working with agencies it is still best if you take the lead to manage the content. It is almost never cost-effective for your agency to enter, adjust and tweak content. You are best off in the long run to learn at least the basics of the CMS and perform content entry and edits yourself. It is also advisable that you learn how to perform general maintenance tasks such as user management.
