When we get asked to help someone with their website, for SEO or website updates, if they are with another website designer its important to ensure that we can have access to their website code (via ftp) and access to their database (via phpadmin) and access to their CMS (commonly WordPress) with the wordpress access details, when we dont get all the access, a lot of time / effort and work is wasted, as the following example conversation demonstrates:
[Website Designer] Good talking to you today about your website. We will need domain hosting access / ftp access / wordpress admin access to the site to make any necessary changes. Normally you will have all these passwords / links and if they can be provided we can then complete any update / change you want on the site.
Once we have access you can give us a list of the updates you want, we will acknowledge these changes and complete them for you, our charges are based on the hourly rate we discussed and you will be charged for by invoice after the changes are completed.
Hope this will be the start of a long term relationship where you can come to rely on us for all your website requirements. We will need
1 ftp details / domain admin details
2 The full name / address for the invoice
3 confirmation that you have sent all the info / update requests that you have and want us to commence the changes.
Before we start will give you a list of the tasks we will do and we charge £30 per hour for website updates. Will await the ftp / WordPress / domain access details.
[Website Owners] Thank you so much for helping and can’t wait to see our new revamp website. Please make it as stunning as ever.
Forwarding you now most of the info we have to start working on via dropbox and there’s a blog to put up , a video (poster) and also many house made videos that would look nice on our site. Please feel free to do things as cool as possible (make it stand out).
Will be forwarding you things all the time for updates and also look into making our website top in the ranking on Google. What I’m I signing for and how much is it going to be?
I spoke with our existing website designers who says that he can point the domain where you need it pointed as he can set the nameservers or webforwarding. The domain itself is part of a group of domains that he controls but can point to wherever the content is. He says the easiest is to upload to a new location to which he can point the domain names:
[Website Designer] That’s good information but we will need the ftp / cpanel only for your domain to make these initial changes.
The ftp details you sent via text message don’t work and I think to avoid this confusion / problems we need the ‘real’ ftp / cpanel details not a mirror of the site.
The best alternative would be to transfer the domain so we have full / unrestricted use of the site and you will be on an award winning UK based server. To do that we need a zipped up copy of the files and a backup of your database, we will also need the EPP / Transfer code. We have done this hundreds of times and believe this is the best idea.
[Website Owners] Why not make the changes then please send me your files and we would upload them here. By the way its not a mirror its the site we have decided to use going forward.
Because of other contracts I’m unable to transfer you the domain I’m afraid. So if there’s anyway you can work with what you’ve got, I’m happy to continue. As I’m really restricted here.
[Website Designer] This is getting complicated J assuming you cant give us ftp access / cpanel access we now think you want us to create a virtual copy of your website / database do the changes locally then send you the updated files? This is really a strange request but if you send us the website files / database we will do our best to make the changes for you.
I have got to say that this very strange / unusual / complicated and think if we had access to your ftp / cpanel the changes would be completed by now as we have listed them below:
Received
44 gallery images
three press documents
press link document
BBC Essex interview
Photos for the new project
Logo
Website Update Tasks
1 Add more videos from your youtube channel to the site
2 Remove full stops after navigation links
3 Embed the BBC interview within the news section of the website (in place of the link that doesn’t work)
4 Add press documents to the press section / news pages
5 Add the gallery images to the website gallery
6 New front page image (image name is main.jpg – smiling pink eyebrows with big shoulders)
7 Update wordpress core file plus all plugins and remove the commenting facility and remove all spam comments
8 Add Instagram logo / link to website
9 Create Gallery and add new photos.
