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A Domain of One’s Own

When we work with new clients, we have a list of recommendations for business websites and one of the most important is making sure our clients own their own domain. 

We recently encountered a complicated website project for a client who didn’t own and have absolute control of their business’ domain. Often marketing companies/agencies will advertise their website building services with offers to help purchase a business’ domain. But if the purchase of the domain is made by the marketing company, the domain belongs to the marketing company. If a client doesn’t own their domain or website address, they’re a bit hamstrung when it comes to making changes to their website, decisions about hosting, management of admin users, or shifting to different platforms when the time comes to update.

Even worse, if a business wants to move away from one marketing company/agency to another, they may have to negotiate the purchase of their business’ domain or possibly not be able to secure their domain name at all.  

If you’re thinking about building a website for your business, we always suggest buying your domain name first. For easy domain name searches and reasonable prices for domain names, we recommend GoDaddy.com. It’s also a good idea to buy the .com and .net versions of your domain to cover your bases. Keep in mind, buying the .edu, .gov, etc. versions are not worth your money.

If you currently have a website and you’re unsure of who owns your domain, do some research to find out now before something goes sideways and you find yourself scrambling to fix a problem. And if you find that a marketing or website company owns your domain, consider asking about how you can purchase the domain from them.

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