Attention all business owners! Do you know the answer to this question: Who gets to keep the website after you divorce your webmaster?

Just like in a marriage, it all depends on the pre-nuptial agreement (contract). Do you have one?

My personal disclaimer: Some of this information may be about legal issues; however this article is not intended as a substitute for legal advice. I am not an attorney nor do I play one on webTV therefore you should consult with an attorney familiar with the laws concerning internet and intellectual property.

Ok, now on with the story, the short version. . .

Here's the situation, for whatever reason the client decided not to pay their annual bill for web hosting services. Even though there were several attempts to reach the client the bill went unpaid for more than 90 days. As a result, the hosting was cancelled and the site was removed from the server.

Several months later the client sent this exact message: "you have my website and I need you to let me know how to get it back, like I said before I paid you money to build it so....? that money had nothing to do with hosting or anything".

Just because you paid for the development of your website does not mean you own it. There are Intellectual Property laws designed to protect the creator and to encourage the creator to create. If you hired a company they own the software development and website design produced by its employees. If you hired an independent contractor you must obtain a written "assignment" of the copyright in the commissioned work from them.

Most business owners unknowingly give their webmaster complete control over their business website. Even if you don't have a pre-nuptial agreement (contract) or own your website you can still maintain some control. While you and your webmaster are honeymooning be sure you can document the answer to these questions:

1. What software was used to develop the website?

• Exact name
• Version
• Software website

2. How to access the code?

3. Where is the code located on the server?

4. How to change the content?

• Graphics
• Text

5. How to create a weekly back up?

6. How to grant access to additional users?

7. How to obtain the master copies of your website design?

As a business owner, how many people realize their webmaster is like their spouse? Voluntarily joined for life (or until divorce), not many! Just like in marriage a prenuptial agreement (contract) is a practical solution to dealing with the risks and problematic topic of who gets to keep the website after your divorce.

There are many factors that you need to consider when hiring a webmaster, you need to ensure that you will get customer satisfaction as well as good value for money. You would hate to choose an inexperienced webmaster who cannot meet your requirements because you would have to go through the whole process again to get the job done. It means if you made any partial payment you may lose that which will then lower your budget when looking for another webmaster.

Firstly you have to identify the places that you can find these talented webmasters who have the skills to complete you job. There are many relevant forums such as DigitalPoint, WickerFire and Web Talk Forums where you will be able to post exactly what you need and people who are capable will get in contact stating a price if you haven't set a maximum budget. Aside from the forums there are specific websites that aims to connect freelances with clients so that you can get all your work done much easier and in a timely manner. You could also ask your friends and family to see if they have been in the market in the past for something similar and found a reliable good webmaster, this will also take a lot of the risks out because you know that they are here to make a living and not out to scam unsuspecting people.

If you are going to search the forums or websites for a webmaster you should be very cautious about what you state in your thread and make sure you don't miss any important information out that may prolong the process.

This is the kind of information you should always state when creating a project on a forum or freelance website:

• Exactly what you need doing, try to include as much detail as possible as it will make it easier for the webmaster to quote you an accurate price. It will also prevent the conversation in between telling the webmaster what they need to do. If you can do this successfully they should have everything they have to get started as soon as you accept the quote.
• Deadline, one of the most important things for a webmaster is to know the maximum deadline. This will also remove the factor of them having to rush a job to get it done to an unexpected deadline because if the webmaster was to miss any deadlines it will look bad from their side which may deter many other people from using them in the future.
• Maximum budget, this is quite important in the fact that it will eliminate any webmasters that charge over your budget so is well worth putting into the pitch somewhere.
• Any additional information that you feel will be beneficial to the chosen webmaster.

After you have set your project up you will get overwhelmed with responses and quotes from people who believe they are capable of meeting your requirements. You then have to go through the responses one by one to see if anyone stands out from the crowd, your budget will be a major deciding point at this stage because if anyone has quoted an amount over your budget you can discard that right away.

You should always ask for samples of previous work so that you will be confident in your decision and don't choose anyone that is simply after your money. Any reputable webmaster will have a portfolio showcasing their talents and strengths ready for you to take a look at. Each forum or website will have a rating system in place so you can see how successful they have been since starting as a freelance webmaster. Take a look at their history and feedback to see what comments past customers have left as this will be the only information you can rate them on.

When you have found the webmaster you want to take on, the next step is to arrange payment. Many people will require a 50% upfront or a deposit of some sort to show the webmaster that you are serious about this and want the working doing. If you are new to the freelance website/forum you will not have built any reputation or feedback so they may request full payment upfront to secure the job. Check their feedback before you make any payments but if it seems to be 100% positive then everything should run smooth.

You can use payment methods such as escrow or paypal to make things a little safer as if you don't get what was promised you can file a charge back and have a good chance to get some, if not all of your money back. Try to build a good reputation on these websites so that in future if you need any work doing it will be a lot easier to have a smooth transaction.

When choosing the best content management system for your project, it is important to weigh both the technical and non-technical pros and cons. Both technical and non-technical reasons can ultimately affect the bottom line cost. Therefore, it is not recommended to simply choose a content management system based solely on technical language or feature set. In this article, we will take a look at an open source content management system called Radiant CMS.

Radiant is a Ruby on Rails based solution that works with a variety of databases. It has a few years of development and a couple noteworthy deployments. There are technical and non-technical reasons why Radiant CMS is a good choice for a content management system.

Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: It's Ruby on Rails based which can speed development by taking advantage of the convention over configuration paradigm. In addition, the Radiant code base has excellent automated coverage in unit tests. This means the code is well tested and robust. Unit test code coverage can be one aspect to measure when considering open source content management systems. In fact, we could suggest the amount of code covered by automated unit and integration tests should be considered when choosing any open source library and/or framework. It is an easy indicator to measure and compare. But, that is an entirely different conversation.

Radiant CMS also has an excellent extension system. This allows customizations required by your project to be made. When choosing a content management system, the ability to add and maintain any customizations should be an important factor. This point should be considered not only from the beginning, but how your customizations will evolve as upgrades and enhancements occur within your chosen content management system. In other words, if the core CMS is modified to provide the custom functionality, how can upgrades or patches from the core CMS developers be applied to your modified version. Radiant's extension system provides this separation of concern.

The Radius tagging system of Radiant is fantastic for adding dynamic functionality. It is nice that tags can be added directly to page content rather than some kind of comment or special character sequence in order to indicate non-static content.

Non-Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: Radiant has an elegant, intuitive administrative interface. It is not intimidating to the non-technical user. In fact, the design encourages people to embrace using the system, because they assume it is going to be easy to pick up and learn.

The lack of workflow functionality can be considered a feature in many cases. In competing CMS products, workflow can seem like an attractive feature at first, but is often hindrance to configure and work around for projects which require only a few administrators of content.

An additional, non-technical reason to choose Radiant CMS is cost. The project is open source and the community of ruby on rails developers and ruby on rails hosting providers is growing, so your cost risk of obtaining these resources is minimized.

Conclusion

From a technical perspective, the open source, Ruby on Rails based Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice. From a non-technical perspective, Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice as well. When combining both perspectives, we have had many positive project experiences and deployments using Radiant over the past year and a half.