Web designer won't release password to the site

  • I wonder if anyone else here has had any experience with this.

    An author I know had a WordPress site professionally designed a couple of years ago. She’s been updating the blog and so forth, and now she wants to rearrange the menus and add something to the widgeted home page, and the original designer seems to be balking at releasing the admin password to her.

    There’s no payment dispute here. Just a designer who invites her former client to check out her $120-per-month-and-up maintenance program.

    This seems unethical, like a home remodeler not returning the keys to the home owner.

    Does anyone have any experience dealing with this situation? What are the site owner’s options?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • The site owner’s options are to access the site at server level and “take over”, if necessary, but that might require first hiring someone else to do anything or everything necessary for doing that. Looking at this situation from the Developer’s view: If s/he gives the owner complete access as an Admin and things get all messed up, the job of getting everything straight again could be a big one. So, maybe the Developer is actually looking out for the owner’s best interest at the moment and wants to avoid having to send a large invoice later…or possibly wanting to be sure the owner truly wants to make a clean break.

    Thread Starter janvbear

    (@janvbear)

    Thanks for that feedback. I think she needs to get very clear with the designer.

    I don’t think that the designer should withhold any admin passwords. That’s just not a very ethical way to do business. In a case like this it’s obvious that the designer is just trying to cling onto their residual income from the site. Im my case where I work we give the clients full access, but we always make sure that we have full backups set up for every site so that if (when…) the client breaks it, we can go back to where it was. Of course if something is the clients fault we do charge them to fix it, but they are mostly happy to do this because they know that it’s their own fault.

    There are options that can get around this situation, and most of them can be found here. The one that I’d recommend that they look at is 4 Through phpMyAdmin – and while they are doing that make sure that they change the accounts email address to their own email address! They’ll need to change the email address too so that any password change notifications go through to their account.

    It all depends on the agreement that was reached when the author hired the designer, though. Perhaps there is a stipulation in the contract that the designer retains administrative control, for whatever reason. I’ve had clients specifically tell me they don’t want access to anything on the backend, ever, for fear of creating havoc, and only want me to pass along credentials and control if they hire someone else to take care of maintenance going forward, for example.

    Sounds heavy handed, but one has to pay attention to fine print…

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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