Ownership of digital assets, explained without the jargon

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Here is ownership of digital assets without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The short version

Domains and accounts should be registered to you. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

A reasonable first step

Get it in writing before work starts. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

How to tell if yours is fine

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. 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
• Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.