I worked with a client recently whose website was originally designed by another designer, who also had designed some marketing pieces for her business. Since the time the website and print materials were created, the designer had moved away and was not responding to emails and phone calls; plus, the people who were in control of access to her website were doing likewise. My client wanted to make changes to her site and her brochure but she didn’t have possession of or access to the original files.

It’s an incredibly frustrating situation to be in—knowing that the files should be your property because you paid for them, but in reality, they are out of your reach and control. This is NOT how it should be.

Here’s a list of things you should request from your designer and keep for your records:

For your website:

• Your domain name account information—registrar’s name, account number/username and password
• Domain name expiration date (very important not to let your domain name expire!!!)
• Your hosting company’s name, your account username and password
• FTP access username and password
• You may not need a copy of the site files, but you should make sure that the designer has a backup copy of the complete site. Since websites are subject to change, it’s not really necessary for you to have a copy.

For printed materials:

• You can request that the designer give you the original files on CD or send them to you via email (if they’re small enough). You should know what application they were created in. You won’t be able to open the files without having the same app, but you should be able to hand them off to a new designer, if necessary.
• If the new designer doesn’t have the app they were created in, this may be a caution flag as to your choice of designers. Any designer worth her salt will have the major design applications (i.e., Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. and even Publisher, though I don’t consider Microsoft Publisher a professional design app…)
• PDFs are NOT original files! They are like a nicely baked cake—it looks good and tastes good but you no longer have the separate ingredients that went into it.

My clients are always able to request the source files and access information for any project I create for them and I will be glad to accommodate them, even if they have chosen to go with a different designer. It’s all about being a professional.

More and more a website is becoming the first impression a potential customer receives of a business. What does it say about a company if its appearance is in disarray? It’s like the paint peeling off your building or a shabby welcome mat—not a very good first impression.

Not only that, but it devalues the money invested in having the site professionally built in the first place. It’s like buying a new car and then hiring the kid next door to maintain it. He might be able to change the oil but he’s most likely not going to be able to work on the fuel injection system. Over time it will suffer if left in the hands of the unskilled.

So while the neighbor or friend or employee might know enough to edit the HTML of a website, s/he may not have the expertise nor the eye of a web designer, a must-have to keep a website looking its best and functioning as it should. S/he probably won’t know how to optimize photos and graphics so that they load quickly and save the site visitor the annoyance of slow loading images and pages. And chances are, s/he won’t have the knowledge necessary to optimize your web pages for the best possible search engine results.

Printed marketing collateral can have the same impact on customers as your website, for better or worse. I have a client for whom I designed some business cards a few years ago—a very nice, clean design, I thought. But when she needed to have cards printed again, she didn’t come back to me to help her with the revisions needed. She just let the printer (or whoever) do the layout. The result was less than satisfactory. The text was crowded over to the very edge of the card—not a professional job in my book. But her business card is the first impression she gives to potential clients!

It’s my firm belief that “you get what you pay for.” I think it’s well worth the money to hire a professional to do the things that are so important to the image of your business and that are critical to your customer’s first impression.