Through consulting with many clients in the San Diego and Southern California area, I've seen many situations where business owners have simply not been happy with the past providers they've had for website design or web marketing services.

There are a range of reasons why this occurs, but below are some key things a business owner should understand before hiring a web guy (or girl). These will help you avoid frustrating situations in trying to market your business online.

You may have been in a situation where you worked with a web guy to create your website. However, somewhere along the line you both stopped working together, either by flat out firing him, or just simply by him (or you) being pulled in other directions.

Either way, the outcome of this type of situation is usually that you have paid for a website but can't seem to gain access to the files, make changes, etc. When you hire a friend or another web guy to make changes, you may have had to start from scratch.

Setup Your Own Website Hosting

First, when you setup a website, setup your own "website hosting" instead of having the web designer set it up. You can use GoDaddy.com or any other web host in most cases, but the most important part is that you will own the hosting account and control it…not your web designer.

By the way, feel free to ask for your web guy's guidance in which hosting account to purchase, but do the actual purchase / registration on your own credit card in your own name. You can then simply provide a login to your web guy.

Register Your Own Website Address

Secondly, you need to confirm that you own the website address registration as well. This is done by either registering the website through your hosting account or through an external website, such as namecheap.com.

What I recommend doing is (1) signing up for your own website hosting account, at the direction of your web guy and (2) registering your website through this hosting account, at the direction of your web guy. Regardless of who does the actual registering, you need to be sure that at the end of the day, the web hosting account is in your name, your website address is registered to your web hosting account, and that you control the usernames/passwords for the accounts.

Get The Source Files- You Paid For The Work

Lastly, make clear to the web designer that you expect to be provided with the photoshop source files for your website, along with any other source files. This will make it so that you have all the files for the website in a single place. Download all of these files (source files, website files, image files, etc.) to your computer as a backup when the project is completed so that you have all of them available. Some web designers might cringe at this request, but you need to be firm and simply let them know that you want to have all the project files in a single location and in your control and can't move forward on a project without them. It's only fair that you receive all of the web files since you're paying them for the project.

More tips coming soon in part II of this blog post...