Many companies have the IT manager, office manager or any company employee who understands how to register a domain, register the company’s domain. This is not a problem, until 2 or 5 years later, when ABC Company wants to move web hosting providers and discovers they have no access to their own domains.

What generally happens, when businesses need to register a domain, is that the employee uses a lot of their own personal information to register the domain. They may even create the account under their own name, using their own personal email, particularity if this is a new business or the first web site for an existing business.

So how can you, as a business owner, protect yourself. First, have the employee create the account under your name or the business owner’s name. Second if they must use their email account to register the domain at first, make sure you have access to the account and change the contact info to your email address.

When you hire a consultant or a web hosting company to establish your web presence, make sure they use your business information. NEVER allow another company to put their information under the Administrative
Contact. You, as the business owner should always be under the Administrative Contact. If you have a web designer or hosting provider helping you manage your site, it is okay for them to be under the Technical Contact.

Whoever is listed under the Administrative Contact is the owner of the domain. Make sure that all the contact information is pointing to your business. Even if John Doe is the Administrator and he is no longer at your company 5 years later, you can a least request the account information be updated from the registrar. They may require you to provide letterhead and business license information, but you would still have a chance to gain control of your domain.  If all contact information is pointing towards your employee, it would require a lot more time and expense to gain ownership again.

If you do not know who is listed as the owner of your domain, you can look up the whois record at sites like Domain Tools. If you see anything referencing privacy, you may have privacy protection (keeps your email and other information private to avoid spamming) on your domain. You may need to have access to that feature, which may require a separate account. Some registrars create an additional account for the privacy on top of the domain account.

The Administrative Contact will receive all notifications of domain expiration, so it is important that the email address is up-to-date in order to avoid your domain expiring without your knowledge.

Domains are the most important part of your web presence. Domains cannot be replicated and if lost, are extremely difficult to get back, if at all. Your domain is part of your business and should be owned by your business.

- Custom graphics

- Integration of WordPress (CMS & Blogging) and custom WordPress theme

- Integration of Google Maps API

-Implement basic SEO standards

- Custom graphics

- Integration of WordPress (CMS & Blogging) and custom WordPress theme

- Integration of Google Maps API

-Implement basic SEO standards

cPanel allows you to mange your Email Accounts, Webmail, Spam Assassin, Backups, File Manager, FTP Accounts, Site Stats, Error Logs, MySQL Databases, phpMyAdmin, and so much more. But what does it all mean? cPanel has many features you may never need or use, but there are a handful you should get to know.

One of the most important features is email. I have had many clients, who have come from other hosting providers, asking if they need to ask me for a new email account. I like to tell them that those days are over, “this is your hosting account and you should and do have complete control over it”.  cPanel allows you to manage all of your email accounts associated with your domain or domains. You can reset passwords and change how much space each email box account is allocated. In addition you are given access to Webmail for each account and instructions on how to configure email clients, like Outlook, using POP3 access.

In the next few months, I hope to highlight additional features and hopefully give more insight as to how and when to use them. In the meantime, checkout the Getting Started Wizard in your cPanel, which introduces the main features of web hosting through your cPanel.

cPanel provides excellent documentation detailing the cPanel home screen and more documentation on all the features in cPanel.

Organic search results are based on relevant  search terms, not paid entries. Which means if you type “cat collars” into a search engine, it should return only sites that have the term “cat collars” on their page. The site that has the most terms matching your search, should show up first in the search results. But volume of search terms, is not the only element that effects the rank of the search result. Search engines also look at the quality of the terms frequency. Which means you can not type “cat collars” 100 times, which is called search engine “spamming.

Other factors effecting the search result rank, involve cross links. External links to other sites that are relevant to your sites content (industry). So it comes down to your “friends”.  Linking to your friend’s fantasy football league, will not benefit your site.

Bottom line is that there is no “recipe” to “Top 10 Ranking”, only guidelines. What I always advise our clients, is to just write honest content. We advise our clients that we write search engine friendly code and sites that can easily be indexed. High ranking does note happen over night. Minor changes over time will improve and will help establish your site.

- Integration of WordPress (CMS & Blogging) and custom WordPress theme

There are plenty of articles describing their tactics as a scam. I will not say that, but I will definitely say they are trying to tick people into transferring their domain registration to them. Yes, the letter does state in the third paragraph, that you do not have to register with them. It also states in the last sentence that “This notice is not a bill, “. But I can see to how the average person, who registered a domain for their small organization, recieves this notice and just assumes that Domain Registry of America is their registrar ( to begin with.

So, please if you receive any notice from a company you have never heard of about your domain, stop. DO NOT SEND MONEY or CREDIT CARD info, until you find out who is your registrar. Many organizations do not know who, when, or where their domain was registered. It was probably years since it last had to be renewed. If you are unsure of who is your registrar, checkout Domain Tools Whois Lookup. This is just one of many sites, that can provide you with some of the basic information about your domain. Who is the administrator of your domain (person who can make changes, basically legal owner), who is the registrar (main company that your domain is registered with or the ICANN Accredited company).

If you are a client of ours, please don’t hesitate to call or email and ask for help. Even if you are not our client, I would be happy to help you find your information, to get you started on the right path.

- Client has the ability to update all their own content without intruding on the design (WordPress integration with custom design)

- Events Calendar (updatable by client)

- Google Maps API integration (location points set by client)

- Spam prevention for email addresses used in the content

- Linked to Google Analytics for more detail web stats

- Translation of content into several languages

- Ability to create and add own online forms

- Custom graphics

- Integration of WordPress (CMS & Blogging) and custom theme

- Integration of Google Maps API

- Custom mobile site directed at iPhones/iTouch