A practical checklist for ownership of digital assets

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Run through this the next time ownership of digital assets comes up.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The checklist

• Domains and accounts should be registered to you
• Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency
• Get it in writing before work starts
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

The reason this keeps coming up

Domains and accounts should be registered to you. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

In practice

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Three things worth confirming about ownership of digital assets before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Domains and accounts should be registered to you — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.