Considerations, Concerns and Suggestions for Success

Small businesses that create websites and other internet based digital products are at a disadvantage to larger firms for several reasons.  Because they are small (for the purposes of this article, small means less than 50 employees), they lack the resources of the bigger firms.  This means that the projects they take on must be smaller in scope and usually timeframe. A paradox forms because of this relationship. Small businesses take on small projects because they lack the resources for big projects, yet to be competitive, they must take many small projects on at once, many of which will inevitably have delays and changes to timeframes, and lead to the firm lacking resources anyway when deadlines coincide.

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Several sets of usernames and passwords are imperative for making changes and updates to your website.  Especially for sites that are a few years old and were developed by outside developers, these passwords get easily lost – frequently the scenario is the employee that kept track of them has long since left the company or the file storing them has been deleted.

Unfortunately, the time you realize you really need this information is when there is an emergency – and the time it takes to track down the passwords ends up being very expensive.

Examples of such scenarios include:

• The domain name has expired and your website no longer loads. The domain name will be available for purchase to anyone.
• Content errors, such as pricing are on the website and are limiting sales.
• Legal action is threatened about content, and needs to be changed immediately.
• Employees leave under bad circumstances and related content needs to be changed immediately
• 3rd party providers change their services and immediate attention is required to keep your site active or current

Track down the following list of important website related passwords and store them in a safe place that is not tied to an individual employee.  I explain why it’s important and ways to track it down as well.

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“Wow how time flies! Remember way back in 2003, when the company decided we needed a fantastic website, with all of the latest bells and whistles? Well we did it, and it served us quite well at first. But it is showing its age now though, isn’t it? I guess it’s time to call the designers and developers and make some changes….”

Does this scenario sound familiar? It’s sometimes hard to believe, but given the rapid speed of Internet growth, the cutting edge technology that companies worked so hard to implement just a few years ago is now outdated and insufficient.  I’ve been working with many companies that are coming to this realization, and an unfortunate trend has appeared. These companies, sadly are completely determined to keep using their 3rd party vendors and service providers.

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