How about them Cowboys?: A Lesson Learned

Finally the Dallas Cowboys fired head coach Wade Phillips on Monday. It's been one of those kinds of seasons for the storied franchise when you loose your quarterback for the year due to an injury and your team well let's face it lacks any desire to win and usually when that happens the coach is let go. When this happens, news is desired immediately and the first stop a passionate and/or in this case a rabid fan base will more than likely visit will be the team's official website.

The team's website is the central source for information it is where press conferences and press releases are posted, as well as any  ancillary news related to the team. Unfortunately for Cowboys fans, to add insult to injury, looking for the latest news on the firing of Philips and the possible name of his successor were meet with a generic landing page with links to pro football, football scores, and NFL news along with an image of two young boys playing soccer.

What happened to the Cowboys and more importantly dallascowboys.com? Simple, the team forgot to renew their domain name dallascowboys.com. Fortunately they quickly renewed the domain, but the renewal process can at minimum two days to go through, and for a website to propagate on a domain even if it's been there before. The Cowboys got lucky the dallascowboys.com site came back up a day later, but in a society that is very well connected especially through social media the team more than likely took an additional credibility hit from critics and non Cowboy fans world wide.

The Cowboys are not unique, more often than not I find that many of my clients have no control over their own domain name and or hosting situation. Quite often this is delegated to an outside vendor simply becasue the company does not know how to register a domain or set up a hosting account which are all very simple tasks. Domains can be renewed for multiple years at a time, and most hosting providers send multiple email notices as the renewal date draws near to the person listed as the primary website contact. It's a set-it-and-forget-it process that takes about five minutes.

Several years ago I worked for a company that simply forgot to renew their domian, missed all the reminder emails, and when time came to redevelop their website, their domain was rightfully taken by someone else who had the presence of mind to buy the domain to purchase it for next to nothing and sold it back to us for several thousand dollars. It took us nearly 2 months to get the domain back under our control. A costly mistake for something that could have cost the company less than $20.00.

I had a first time client, last Summer,  contact me about his website that went down two days before the Fourth of July weekend and could do nothing to get his site up. A stark white, blank web page with a the words "Fatal Error" was all that his customers could see when they landed on his site. The client could not access his own hosting account because he surrendered both the hosting and the domain control over to an outside vendor who simply forgot about his website. The worst part of this was the client had just sent a an email out to 2,000 customers with a significant Fourth of July offer. Fortunately the site came back on line two days later, but the well intentioned promotion was a bust.

I am probably at odds with my peers and more than likely losing some money when billing my clients for web design, but base on my professional experiences, I require that all of my clients purchase their own domains and hosting for three reasons:

1. The responsibility rests with the company for renewing the domains and hosting
2. The company remains in control of the domains and hosting if something happens to me/my company
3. The company has the freedom to pursue more cost effective or high performance domain and hosting options

Moral of the story, take ownership of your hosting and domain, they are valuable brand/marketing assets. In the web design industry there are a lot of well intentioned people and companies working out there providing great services for great prices, and everything seems all well and good until you change your domain or want to move your hosting to another company. Trust no one with your domains and hosting except yourself, think of them like your social security number, or bank account number.

How many people do you want to have access to these valuable assets?

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About Breakaway Creative

Founded in 2006, by Scott Olason, Breakaway Creative, LLC, is a full service graphic and web design and development company located in Phoenix, Arizona, offering a broad range of marketing product design services. From complete identity packages, to websites to one-off pieces and anything in between, Breakaway Creative consistently develops and delivers unique, polished marketing products that enable businesses to present a clear message and professional image to their customer markets. For more information about Breakaway Creative, LLC, please visit: www.BreakawayCreative.com