Why ownership of digital assets matters more than it looks

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Ownership of digital assets is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Why this earns attention

Domains and accounts should be registered to you. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to watch for

Get it in writing before work starts. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

In practice

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.