What to do when your web designer leaves town

We get this call three or four times a year:

  • Caller: Can you get my website back online?
  • Kona Impact: Maybe, do you have website hosting?
  • Caller: I don’t know. My web designer left town and she took care of it. It’s not online now.
  • Kona Impact: Can you contact her?
  • Caller: No, she moved to Colorado, I think. Her website is off, too.

Unfortunately, there is not much we can do to help at that stage. If you don’t have a backup of the website, the original designer is gone, and the server on which the website resided is no longer hosting your website, there is little we can do to help.
There are a few things you can do to ensure that you don’t find your website offline when your web designer leaves town.

  1. Ask for a backup of your website when it is completed. The files probably won’t mean much to you, but a competent techie guy or gal could easily re-establish website hosting from a proper backup.
  2. If your web designer made your logo, ask for the following file types: Adobe Illustrator, Encapsulated PostScript, Adobe PDF, Jpeg, and Png. The Illustrator and EPS files (and perhaps the PDF) are editable files if you have the proper software. This will allow you to change your logo, resize it and manipulate it for various uses.
  3. Ask your web designer where your website is hosted and who controls the billing and administration of that account. If your web designer has your website hosting under her hosting plan, you will not be able to maintain the billing and hosting for the website. Seriously consider asking your web designer to move your website to a hosting account you control.
  4. If #3 is not possible, ask for full access to the website, including all logins and passwords.
  5. Make sure you have a way to continue paying for the hosting charges.

If your website is old and not optimal for your needs, consider making a new one. This is a perfect time to start anew and get the online presence you have always wanted.
At Kona Impact, we have been designing and hosting our clients’ websites for over 12 years. We do realize that our clients’ websites are very important to their businesses. As such, we have a firm commitment to ensuring that our clients’ websites are online 24/7. We keep cloud, onsite and offsite backups of websites, and have a plan to ensure that any business disruption will not result in issues for our clients.