Last week, a friend of mine told me about a problem she was having with her webmaster. She no longer trusted this person that she was in charge of her e-commerce website.
Their relationship is similar to most webmaster-client relationships: the webmaster understands the complexities of web design and search engine placement, and the client relies solely on their expertise. Lack of technical knowledge and client dependency can make you an unwitting victim of unscrupulous webmasters. That is exactly what happened to my friend.
Now, most webmasters are solid, honest citizens who work hard for their clients. But the few bad apples… well, ruin it for everyone.
Webmasters know many types of secure data. Some of the information I routinely receive is customer credit card numbers, home addresses, secret words or questions, usernames and passwords. Customers seem willing to hand over whatever information is necessary to secure their domain names, hosting service, payment gateways, and security certificate settings. In addition, I also have access to all customer purchase information: addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, credit card information, and login usernames and passwords.
With that in mind, security breaches and data misuse become a possibility. Trusting a webmaster, whose moral foundation is “whatever it takes to make money”, will quickly turn into disaster for the client.
Disaster hit my friend’s business. His webmaster set up the website and email accounts and hosted it on his web server. He controls the entire process leaving my friend out of the loop. She sends him changes because he doesn’t even have a username and password. If the webmaster were competent and trustworthy, the relationship could continue like this for a long time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
Maybe a bug, maybe a design error? NOT. This webmaster was siphoning off his customer list and selling it to spammers. Further investigation showed that an employee was also providing the webmaster with mass mailing lists.
How did you discover that you could no longer trust your webmaster? She heard it from his clients, his bread and butter. Customers were complaining that they were receiving massive amounts of spam after signing up for information on my friend’s website. Knowing that he has an anti-spam policy, he began to investigate.
After setting up a fictitious Hotmail account, he went to their website and submitted the Information Request form. She then waited to see if she received that request. Finally, she received the request, but not from the original email, but a copy sent by the webmaster. It seemed that the webmaster had pointed the form at his email address.
This resulted in a laid off employee, a distraught customer, lost customers, lost revenue, lost brand recognition, the added expense of setting up a new site on a different hosting company server, and a forced domain name change. . The domain name change was forced because the webmaster refused to change the nameservers (how the web finds your site) to point to the new site address.
Does this happen all the time? No. Does it happen enough to take into account the credibility of a webmaster? Yes, this is the problem. Those of us who are working to maintain a client’s trust realize that we have to account for the bad apples. We have to show that we are not one of them.
Following these simple rules will give you peace of mind when hiring a webmaster:
- Ask and SEE references. (Don’t just go to your site and see your customers, pick up the phone)
- Make sure the contract includes details:
- Design and Optimization Details
- Finish date
- Specific appeal if the site does not meet the end date
- 50% down payment (do not pay for all work in advance)
- Put all requests in writing.
- Specify in the contract a date to deliver the website to the client
- Once the site is delivered (even if the webmaster still supports the site):
- change all passwords
- Change user permissions
- The administrator must be the owner.
- Please test all forms to ensure you receive contact information
- Stay alert, listen to your customers
