Getting started with ownership of digital assets
It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A short on-ramp to ownership of digital assets for teams who have not touched it before.
The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
The reason this keeps coming up
Domains and accounts should be registered to you. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency
- Change one thing and measure it
Get it in writing before work starts. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
How to tell if yours is fine
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
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.