When you agree to work with Prospect27, or another agency that is creating your website, you may have some questions.

Is it your property?

Do you ‘own’ the website?

Can you take the website elsewhere?

Can you stop paying for our service and expect to keep your website?

Ownership.

Who owns the site?

The company you work with to develop the website?

Or you?

It’s a tricky question.

The truth is…

The website is owned by the individual who has registered the domain name and hosts your website.

Your fate is in their hands.

And quite often with website design companies… this is not made clear.

Customers get into contracts, not knowing they are not in full control.

We have seen it time and time again.

Customers come to Prospect27, after having a war with their previous website designer and asking to “take their website elsewhere…”

Only to be charged hundreds of pounds to do so.

Websites require website hosting.

This will always be an external cost for you, when you have a website.

Every company must pay to register your domain name.

Website hosting is also an external cost.

(Read more about website hosting in our ‘Fees Explained’ article’)

If you have a website with a company and they are hosting your website?

Unless you have it explicitly in writing that you own the website – and won’t charged to take it elsewhere?

You can assume that they own your website.

 

We wanted to clear up this question once for all for our customers.

Who owns your website when you sign-up with Prospect27?

Prospect27.

We own your website.

Our customers pay for a website-as-a-service.

We register and licence everything you need for your website:

• Website Hosting
• Domain names
• Email servers
• Themes
• Applications & Plugins

Websites are bespoke.

They are built to suit the needs of your business.

But the licencing is agreement is between the developers of these products, and Prospect27.

This limits us.

We cannot build websites for customers that customers “own.”

This would incur extra fees.

It can be arranged for you to ‘purchase’ the website from us to cover these fees.

But as a general rule…

“The first year of business covers the cost of your website.”

After this period, if you wish to take your website elsewhere?

All we would ask for is a £50.00 transfer fee.

This covers the administrative costs and fees to NOMINET for your transfer.

NOMINET the UK provider of domain names, where you will be have to be registered to accept the domain ownership.

There are fees included when purchasing your domain name.

 

Story of the Takedown Request

We had to issue a website takedown request to an old customer this week.

It was successful.

They asked us to transfer to another provider.

They had won the website is our raffle on Facebook.

They were confused when we said they could not transfer the website.

We explained it was not possible, due to the above points.

We actually own the website, not the customer.

This customer had attempted to steal our website!

There was one damning clue:

Website was still live, even when we switched off service.

Upon approaching them, they told me they had “purchased the theme and recreated the website.”

This was found to be untrue.

Prospect27 had buried code inside all of our websites.

We could see this was the exact website we had developed for the company, but they had transferred it to a new provider.

Which is illegal.

Not only were they breaking the terms of our service, they were breaching licencing requirements by the WordPress theme that we used.

We had also installed several premium plugins that Prospect27 had covered the costs of (Facebook Reviews and other such plugins), which were still being used on their website.

Further proof that they had stolen our website design.

They replied with a response, stating they would not be removing the website, and “I could peruse legal action.”

I did pursue legal action.

And in the meantime, during the time they were illegally using our website, I had a scathing attack launched on my business.

Upon receipt of this message, upset with the fact he couldn’t keep the website we had developed him for free… they left us a review on Facebook and Google.

It wasn’t great.

We take time to address this review, and how your business can handle poor reviews and dissatisfied customers, in another article.

 

The moral of this story, for all customers:

When you get involved with a website design agency.

Ask them: who owns the website?

In our case, we tell customers that Prospect27 own the rights to their website.

And it is paid-off within the first year of service with us.

Though we have 96% retention rate for our customer base within the first 12-months of business.

That means out of 80 customers, we lost 4.

Customers like Smurph Engineering started with us in February, and paid us for the full year from October 2020 to October 2021 after 8-months of service.

Other customers such as Vinnie from Firetech Agency, applaud our service, the quality of our website and has paid us upfront for the year.

He says he is 150% positive that he will pay us another £300 next July, once his initial year with us is complete.

Why?

Because he finds the value in our service.

And doesn’t care about the vanity of believing his “owns his website.”

And he was also told by his previous provider that he “owned his website”, then when he tried to leave them and take it with him, guess what?

He didn’t own the website.

 

Be careful.

A word of caution…

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

We offer monthly managed service, updating every customer website on a monthly basis (at their request and sometimes without them asking) to ensure their website is utilised and improving over time.

We don’t charge a set-up fee for our websites, which I personally spend around 8-10 hours developing before we even get started.

Then we charge £30.00 per month for all of this, inclusive of your domain name, website hosting, email address(es).

Would you really think that you ‘own’ the website that you haven’t paid for?

How would we make a living, if we developed website for free, taking on all the costs of your website hosting, domain name, email address and the time it takes to continue to update your website and retain our customers?

Would that make business sense?

Think about it from the point of view of the provider.

But also, consider yourself.

Do you want to feel like you “own” a website, or do you want a website that works for your business?

Because for me; when you “own” something, you take responsibility for it.

That’s why, when you choose us to create your website…

We might own the domain name and the rights to the website as the provider of your service.

But we take the responsibility that comes with that ownership, to ensure the website works well for you.

If that sounds appealing to you, and  you’re not the type who feels like “owning your website” is the priority – but you want to make a success of your online brand, and build a partnership with us to improve on your online presence over time?

£30 per month websites, no setup fee, unlimited pages, fully managed and updated at your request.