Important tips to save your time, money and sanity!
A friend highly recommends their “tech person” to help you create a new website.
Great! You don’t have time to deal with this, so you say, “Yes.”
Several months later, the site isn’t finished, your contact has vanished, and you’re losing sleep. You have no idea how to access any of your information, and you just lost thousands of dollars on a website that doesn’t exist. Ouch!
Well, don’t worry. This “secret nightmare” happens frequently, so here are…
5 Tips To Avoid Entrepreneurial Tech Rip-Offs
- Ask lots of questions.
Talk to the person you’ll be working with and ask questions like:
Are you doing the actual work and what are your qualifications?
Can I see samples of your work?
How long will it take to finish?
Do you use the same template for all of your clients?
Get answers to all of your questions.
This process gives you information about the process and the potential hire. If they fail to answer your questions or things just don’t seem right, pass!
Now, if you decide to move forward with them…
- Take control.
Some of the things you need to confirm you have access to and own are:
- Hosting service (to access your main website files);
- Domain name (URLs);
- Emails;
- Photos/Videos/Images (without copyright violations);
- Website editing access;
- Billing and payment processes; and
- Any extra services, plug-ins, products, etc. that they purchase under your name.
Get confirmation that you will have complete control over important data. Otherwise, your tech person can simply walk away from the project with all of your content, passwords, customer lists, and more!
- Add maintenance to your budget.
Know that once your new site is up and running, you will need a service to maintain back-ups, retrieve archived data, check email processes, keep it secure, review analytics, and more.
Unless you know what you’re doing, it’s easy to accidentally take down your whole site just by clicking one simple update button! To avoid this, have a budget for tech maintenance fees and ask if these services are covered when creating a new web project.
- Obtain a guarantee.
Reputable companies guarantee their work. Period.
Even if you feel funny asking for one, get a guarantee in writing anyway. If the tech person you are working with is professional and experienced, they will guarantee their services.
This way, you can get a refund or new drafts finished if you don’t like their work. Otherwise, they can give you whatever results they desire (when, where and how they want), and you have no way of getting your money back!
- Create an official, signed agreement.
Once you know all of the project deliverables, deadlines, responsible parties, and more, get it in writing and signed!
You can make this a detailed legal document or create something simple that includes all of the pertinent information (and a confidentiality statement so that your information is protected). This clarifies your arrangement for both parties and eliminates any confusion.
Take Precautions Now to Avoid Future Tech Nightmares!
Conduct your due diligence, get a guarantee, have both parties sign an agreement, and follow your gut instincts.
Otherwise, you can waste valuable resources, unknowingly relinquish site and content ownership, and spend countless hours trying to retrieve your data. Worst of all, you can lose customers and thousands of dollars in sales in a matter of weeks!
Don’t let this happen to you.
Instead, follow these simple tips and have a tech experience that helps your business grow!
