Own Your Website Or Someone Else Will

Scott Ellis — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 19:55:00 +0000

Own your content, your domain name, your links….In Fact, Own Everything

I have worked with a number of clients that didn’t own their domain names, hosting account (didn’t even know their credentials), many of you don’t own your own content or some of the assetts related to your online presence, and that’s a big mistake.

While the idea of truly “controlling” anything online is a bit of a misnomer, to the extent you can exercise ownership (note: I didn’t say control) you should.

Your Domain

I’ve recently worked with several clients who didn’t have control over their domain name. It was under an account owned by the developer (once an ex-boyfriend) that had initally built their site, or someone that used to work for the company but was no longer there, and that is a problem for a couple of reasons:

You are at the mercy of whomever controls it. If they want to shut your site off or redirect it to wherever (use your imagination) there is nothing you can do to stop it
If you ever need to change things, and you will, such your host, but can’t get ahold of the domain owner, the process of getting control back can be a nightmare and is potentially fraught with legal messiness.

Make sure you know:

Who the domain is registered with (e.g. GoDaddy, Network Solutions, etc…)
What your credentials are for that account
Who the contacts are for the domain (Owner, Billing and Technical)
Contact Info is up-to-date

If a developer registers a domain name for you make sure it’s done under a registrar account that you control or is transferred to an account you control as soon as the developer is done with their work.

Note: I recommend GoDaddy for domain registration. Whomever you use, it’s best to go with a big name to be sure you get total DNS control. Many smaller “mom-and-pop” domain registrars don’t provide full control over DNS and that can be problematic under some circumstances.

Hosting

Not the same thing as your domain, hosting is where your domain (website) lives. Sometimes the same place that registers your domain name is also where you host your site, but that isn’t always the case and frequently you’ll host somewhere else. All of my sites are registered with GoDaddy but hosted on my own server, or in the case of VSEllis.com with WPEngine.

The main things to know about your hosting account are:

Who is your host
What are your hosting account credentials
What are your FTP credentials
What type of hosting you have

Make sure hosting is in your name if you own the site so you can exercise changes to the site or provide the necessary information to any new web developers or site administrators you might hire now or in the future.

If a developer sets up hosting for you make sure its done under a hosting account that you control or is transferred to an account you control.

Hosting is exceedingly important for a lot of reasons (see video of John P explaining hosting in detail) so don’t over look good hosting.

Service and Site Credentials

Make sure that the business credentials are also under your ownership. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook logins are all good examples of things that, in many small businesses, may get started by or are run by different people. If you don’t manage those credentials things can get challenging when someone leaves the business or changes need to be made.

Other accounts you’ll want to track info for may include:

Analytics accounts such as Woopra
Feedburner accounts
Email Hosting accounts and related info (SMTP, POP, etc…)

Links and Other Stuff

You can also exercise some ownership over things like links that you put out on Twitter, Facebook and other sites by using plugins like PrettyLink Pro. While services like bit.ly are pretty reliable, if they ever go out of business (as del.icio.us was recently rumored to be doing) then your link history is gone as are the click throughs and other analytics along with them. No reason to leave that in the hands of someone else when you can control it yourself.

A little organization such as a simple spreadsheet or text file (properly secured) can make keeping track of these things much easier and prevents unnecessary delay and difficulty when working with others, such has developers, designers and content producers. It can also keep you out of harms way by allowing you to make changes, including to passwords, when people come and go from your business, whether they’re employees or hired guns.

You website, domain name and other facets of your online presence are assets, so treat them as you would any other investemnt and they’ll pay dividends for a long time. Ignore them, and they’ll take care of someone else.

Editorial Calendar WordPress Plugin Review

Scott Ellis — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:30:00 +0000

You want to make content creation easier right? Sometimes you have a lot of ideas, sometimes …. writers block.

Do phrases like “content strategy” make you a little nauseous? Then check this out…

I’d been reading about the Editorial Calendar Plugin on a few prominent blogs like Copyblogger and Chris Brogan.com, talking about how it’s streamlined things and how much they like it. Still, it took me a couple of months to get around to installing it (which takes all of a few seconds… sad I know).

The result… I love this plugin… but I think it’s important to tell you why and how it’s changed things on VSEllis.com.

Last weekend I went to the WishList Live conference and Stu McLaren gave a great talk about content generation and presented strategies for never running out of ideas. Fortunately, it’s been a long time since I suffered a lack of ideas; in fact I have far more ideas than I have time to write about. But, I remember a time when ideas didn’t flow so easily and I know coming up with ideas consistently is still a challenge for some.

While the calendar plugin itself won’t necessarily help you generate a lot of ideas on it’s own, once you start using it you’ll start to look at your content a little more wholistically, see the gaps in topics you need to fill in, the opportunities for recurring content themes and, most importantly, how blog posts fit together and even what order it might make the most sense for them to be published.

You may even find yourself quickly filling out the calendar with more ideas than you can write about!

The effect of the calendar for small – medium sized sites is it’s impact on getting you out of the forrest so you can see the trees.

For larger sites it’ll also help provide a broad over view of the content, topics and their timing, in addition to the workflow benefits of seeing what’s going to be published and when.