Man, it seems that over the years I’ve heard this same story countless times. I had a client a few years back who had to take a guy to court just to get his domain back after the site went untouched for over a year!

Where are all of these “web designers” coming from?

In 2005, Genma Stringer Holmes, founder of Holmes Pest Control in Nashville, hired a Web designer she’d met through her church. She wanted him to create two Web sites to boost sales for her 11-employee, $500,000 company. Holmes wasn’t looking for anything particularly fancy—she just wanted an informational site about her company that would include the latest news about pest control. Two years later, she says, she’s stuck with two sites that can’t be updated. Since the designer registered the names himself, only people he designates can change them. Holmes can’t shut the sites down or have another Web developer redo them. The Web designer hasn’t returned her phone calls or e-mails since February, 2006. (He did not return calls from BusinessWeek SmallBiz.) Says Holmes: “I was naive and didn’t know what I was doing.”

Source: Business Week

In my opinion, the biggest problem here is that there are way too many part-time designers out there. People whose livelihood doesn’t rest on the shoulders of their web-based endeavors will often times just not stick around.

Small business owners: Do your homework!

It may be the most economically viable option but it almost never makes good business to trust your company into the hands of your uncle’s-cousin’s-next door neighbor’s-son-who-kinda-sorta knows good web design.