Paul Brooks | 10 Dec 2006

Has your web designer disappeared or gone bust? This can leave you and your business in a compromised position, especially if you rely on your website for business generation.

Web design is a fickle industry. The amount of competition facing a small web design company is daunting and a newly emerging agency will find it difficult to make an impact in the crowded marketplace.

As a result, they may struggle to generate sales, fail to bring in enough money and be forced to close down.

While this is sad for the web designers, it will also be a problem for the portfolio of clients they leave behind. Their websites will be left unattended and will slowly become stagnant and out-of-date. They will eventually (or immediately) be turned off by the company that hosts them or the ownership of their domain names will expire, leaving the websites and email accounts unusable.


What If This Happens To You?

If your web designer has disappeared, gone bust or in some way left you with a website you can't use, you have two options:

1. Commission a new website to replace the one you've lost
2. Try to regain control of your old site and get it back on track

Legal ownership of the domain name and the website design and content should* lie with you. This means you will be able to use the domain to point to a new website or a copy of your old one.

Getting control of the original website will require cooperation from your web designers (if they're still around), access to the web server the site is hosted on or a separate copy, possibly on a CD.

The site can then be switched back on, moved to a new location or rebuilt to look and work the same.

Eden Light have helped a number of customers to regain control of their websites after their web designers have disappeared or gone bust.

We will help you to get what you need from your old designers, the website hosts or domain name registrars to get your website back on track. Please give us a call on 0870 2407507 or send use a message to see how we can help.

*In some cases, you may have a legal contract with the web designer that means they own the rights to the site, but this should only apply before any outstanding payments have been settled.

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