Don't feel tied in

We've had two new clients this week who've called us for advice on their existing sites, in short their existing website company wasn't doing what they'd been asking for on the site and their relationship had become strained - they felt caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

We simply advised them to transfer their domain out to another provider so they can gain ownership of it and get another designer to do the work they're after, namely us. It works for the client as he feels he's moving forward and more often than not it works for the previous web designer as they've probably been avoiding the clients calls for weeks.

Hey, who said it was a perfect world, people fall out some times.

The prospect of transferring out a domain name tends to fill some people with a little dread as they feel they may lose control of it and some lurking despot on the web will snap it up. It's dead simple, most reputable domain name providers will offer the option of tranferring a domain name in, obviously they want the work going forward. The existing registrant has to unlock it with the current provider, once again something that is relatively straight forward to do, he then has to put in what's called an IPS tag, this is simply a name for the company that the domain name is being transferred to. You then ask the new domain name company to transfer it in and they'll do the rest. Some people worry that their site will be down for ages during the process, it doesn't have to be. Keep an eye out for when your site goes down and then you know the new provider has control of the domain, the site can then be re-uploaded. What's a little downtime on a site you're not happy with and if you're honest, visitors probably aren't finding it too often anyway, hence you wanting to change it. It's far better to get the site into your own name and make the changes you want than just leaving it there to rot.

Alternatively do what our two new clients have done this week and visit www.sitechooser.co.uk and ask us to do the transfer process and the website changes for you.