We’re an Essex-based web design company, providing website support to small businesses for over a decade. During this time, we’ve encountered an abundance of clients who needed website help because their previous web designer became unresponsive or disappeared altogether.
Being unresponsive is usually the case when a UK web design agency outsources work to a poor offshore team. On the other hand, when a web designer disappears, it usually indicates that they’re just not interested in your project anymore.
In either case, the absence of communication from the former web design agency leaves the small business owner in the lurch. These scenarios can create a wide variety of business and website problems. But not to worry, all can be solved with a little help from the likes of ourselves.
How We Can Help You Solve Your Website Problems
With hundreds of ways to create a website, each with its own unique way of being set up and displayed online, every website requires a tailored approach. As such, we take a series of steps to assess the scale of the problem and how the website was set up.
Web Design Problem #1: Investigating the Website Setup
The first thing we’ll do is investigate your live site (if it is still live). By looking at both the web design and the hard code through a browser we can identify:
- The type of website: Brochure website, Vertical Market website, Social website, E-commerce website, etc.
- How it was built: Does it use a Content Management System (CMS)? If so, which one?
- How it’s hosted and managed: Is it a hosted SAAS solution, or an independently installed CMS on a hosting account?
- Who the host is: Do you own your hosting account or the designer?
- What login details we need (if any): Do we need CMS, hosting, and domain registrar login details or just one set of details?
- Whether we can recoup or move the site: Can we technically and legally move the site or not?
This initial research will reveal a hierarchy of information, particularly about your options for recouping the site, how we can access it, and potentially uncover any bad practices implemented by the previous web design agency.
Web Design Problem #2: Accessing the Website
To potentially recoup your website, we require access to it at all levels. However, access is usually a core problem when a web design studio becomes unresponsive or disappears altogether. Depending on the setup, we may need up to three different sets of login details to recoup the website:
- The website Content Management System (CMS) login details (if any)
- The website hosting login details (if any)
- Any domain registrar login details (if any)
If we can get the hosting login details, the chances of recouping the website improve tenfold, but if we don’t have those details, we need to investigate further.
Web Design Problem #3: Website Hosting Details
By doing a Whois search we can determine who is hosting any given website, who the domain registrar is and who owns the domain name that your website uses to promote itself. After obtaining this information, some customers find that they do have access to login details, and we can then look at specific options to recoup a website. However, sometimes this information reveals bigger problems, such as:
- Your old designer owns your hosting account and not you.
- Your old designer bought your domain name under their own name and account.
This is usually a shocking revelation for customers as it means that the website and domain name may belong to your old web design agency and not you. From here, further research
would be needed, and a new set of options would come into play to figure out how your website can be recovered and what your next best move might be.
Final Steps to Recovering a Website
A website or part of it can usually be recovered in one way or another. However, having no access or permission makes the job longer, harder and more costly, ultimately resulting in a rebuild of the website from scratch.
In this case, the question is raised, “Is it actually worth trying to recover the website completely?”
More often than not, I find that when a web designer or web agency stops responding or disappears, the actual website they created was not a great solution to begin with because the technology used was outdated and the end result was quite sloppy.
In this scenario, most customers are not too concerned about the money that was wasted on the previous web design studio they used. It was the waste of time and energy used chasing them up that was far more damaging to their business. That’s why in many cases, customers having these problems opt to abandon their old site altogether and start fresh with us.
Almost every single company that has approached us with website problems stemming from their last web design company has taken our help and managed to get back online and remained with us as a long-standing client.
If you’re having problems with your current web designer or web design studio and need help or a second opinion, then get in touch with us for free help, advice and some website support.
We’re a design studio based in Essex, UK, but we serve clients nationally and have worked with a wide range of websites and CMS’s. Whether you need to regain access to your existing site or want to explore options for a new solution, we can work within your budget to help you achieve your goals.
