Your website should be yours to take with you

Here is a question worth asking before you sign with any website company: if I leave, what do I take with me?

With some companies the honest answer is nothing. The site lives inside their system, and when the payments stop, so does the website.

What does owning your website mean?

It means you can get everything out, in formats anyone can open, without asking permission.

What do I take with me?

One download holds:

• Every page and blog post, as plain text files that any editor or website builder can read

• Every photo on the site, and every photo stored for it

• Your menu as a spreadsheet: each dish with its section, price and options

• Your hours, special dates and events

• Every inquiry your website received, with your notes

• Your mailing list, if you have one

• Your colors, fonts and layouts

The spreadsheets open in Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets. Nothing in the file needs me.

One honest limit: the download is your content, not a running website. The moving effects run on my platform, so your webmaster sets the pages up again on your own server.

Why make leaving easy?

Because I would rather you stay for the website than for the lock on the door. A business that stays only because it is stuck is not a happy customer.

What should I check on my current site?

• Can I download my pages and photos today, without asking anyone?

• Is my menu stored as text, or only as a PDF or a picture?

• Who holds my domain name? It should be you.

• Are my customer inquiries anywhere but in somebody else's inbox?

If the answers worry you, tell me about your business. What I build for you is yours to take.