Using Offshore Web Designers – Domain Dispute Part 1.

Before I start to explain why I have written this post today, I would firstly like to make this introduction my most important point. Whenever you are going to engage in website design and domain name registration with another company, you MUST have a CONTRACT in place if things go pear shape further down the line.

With companies popping up in India daily offering you cheap web design and hosting it is very tempting to get drawn to these companies but what happens when the company suddenly disappears or transfers your domain and points it to another website that they own, this in turn can causes major problems for your business. What do you do?

Whenever you engage in business with another party, always check them out, see if anyone has written anything bad about them and see how many connections or followers they have. It is always good to perform due diligence on a business to see if they are legitimate or not.

If a company has 190 followers but according to their website they have 90+ staff you may want to question are these figures true and what else are they not telling you, when in reality they have 72 employees in the LinkedIn profile, with offices right round the world.

Did you know you can buy telephone numbers and adresses from different locations around the world to make it look as if you are located in may countries, but in reality you are working in you bedroom all by yourself. Did you also know you can buy followers and likes to social media accounts in which some are just bots and not real users. The world is fake and we need to be careful to suss out the real businesses from the shady ones.

Also if a business claims to have all these offices right round the world but uses the business address as a Flat No, this should set off alarm bells. Just because a website is nicely designed does not mean anything if the owner of the website is indeed not telling you the truth and refraining from drawing up contracts.

So like I said there is a reason for this post as a client of mine contacted me yesterday and said one of his other websites and domain name was pointing to a clothing site yet he is an electrician. So to try and help him I performed a whois report and found the domain had been renewed on the 10th July 2020 and changed servers 7 times in its history, which to me meant that the company that registered the domain on behalf of my client are now cybersquatting his domain name.

My client as a result is losing business hand over fist as his domain name has a carbon foot print many miles long.

I am trying to get my head round this, say for argument sake a client comes to me and orders a web hosting package and asks me to register the domain name on his her behalf. I would first and foremost draw up an agreement stating what would happen if the client defaulted or came to end of his/her contract. I would not leave them in the lurch for starters. Secondly I would not be changing servers. If say I used a particular domain name provider and wanted to host the domain on one of my servers I would not start changing servers unless there was something wrong with them. By changing servers whilst hosting and transferring domain names you will be able to change the ip address and make it more difficult to trace the domain owner.

After more digging I even found a blog that my client is most probably not aware of, using his brand name and logo which has affiliate links integrated into it. All this will be in my report to my client and again all there is a contact form but no email or other contact details. Considering this company I am investigating claims to be professional they are giving a bad name for all other website designers in India and their blog looks like a five year old has done it.

For all intents and purposes I will not post the business entity name or the CEOs for legal reason just yet, which may I add I have sent invitations to connect with me today on Linkedin until I get postive feeback from them.

Hopefully this will get resolved without the whole world knowing about it and it will be a lesson learnt always have a contract and maintain communication between you client and web developer.

As you know I have nearly 8,000 connection of LinkedIn most of which are domain name investors, brokers, website designers and internet marketers and yes some are from India.

(I am not saying all businesses in India are bad, just this particular one that looks very shady www.seofied.com), in fact far from it as I do have some very good clients that I work with from India and this particular company I am investigating is giving everyone else a bad name.

I have in the past had my fair share of emails from dubious web developers from India claiming they can do this that and the other and being something that they are not and if they do not have email signatures or links to their websites stay well away, especially if they use western names rather than their own.

As an exampIe for argument sake I may have an email from someone called ‘Tom Jones’ not the welsh singer but in fact someone in India using a western name, the trust of that person has immediately gone through the window and I will not entertain that person.

If you cannot be honest and use your real name and your real location then you obviously have something to hide. You must be transparent in your business so that people can trust you.

The reason why there are so many web designers, app developers and computer programmers from India is because schools in India from elemetary teach their children computer science as a compulsary subject. This is the future and computer programming, web design, software, app development and artificial intelligence are the main stream industries to be in.

With this said I also have connections with some of the top registrars and connections with WIPO so it would not be beneficial for this company to not try and resolve this issue as quickly as possible as they certainly would not want the bad publicity.

But for the time being I will leave you with these thoughts, whenever you are doing business with a web designer/ app developer or software progammer or business in general from another country make sure you have a written agreement in place and always do your homework and check them out before agreeing to anything.

Will update you when my client and I get some news.

Stay safe!