The first step in starting a website includes getting a domain name. There are a lot of articles about what you should use as a domain name, but we are not going to cover that here. What we are going to do is tell you how to check who owns the domain name.

When a domain name registration is paid for, that domain name is being registered, not permanently bought outright. The domain name may be used only as long as the registration fees and renewal fees are paid. Usually these are renewed once a year although the option is there for registration of the domain name in increments up to 10 years at a time.

Many times, when the domain name is registered, it is registered by a friend, a relative, a web designer, or a web design company, depending on how it was going to be paid for. It is estimated that fewer than 50% of the actual business owners are the ones who set up the registration.

Most web designers and companies will do the domain name and web hosting registration as part of their “web design package” or as a convenience service for their client. When they do this, they will register the domain name and include the cost in their charges to their customer.

Some web designers register the domain name in their name as a matter of practice. Why, you ask? Basically, to make sure the customer pays the web design charges they owe the designer. It is usually a matter of standard business practice and is almost always included in contracts or the company’s Terms & Conditions.

It is also standard business practice to have the domain name registration transferred over to the customer once the customer pays in full for the initial job. Even if the designer is going to continue doing maintenance for the same client, it still should be transferred over because the customer should own the website, the website content, and the domain name once the job is done. However, the transfer is not always being done. We won’t address reasons why, as they vary.

When the domain name is not transferred, the problems start. For all purposes, the website and domain name is owned by the person who is the registrant of record. That means if a registrant has not transferred over the domain name, the registrant can in fact argue ownership of the domain name as well as the website.

How to avoid this problem? Make sure transfer of ownership is spelled out in the contract you sign with a web designer. Contracts should always be used when setting up web design projects, if nothing else, to avoid these type of issues. But that is a future blog.

To check to see who owns a website, go to WhoIs.com, enter in the domain name and look at the information carefully.

When the domain name is registered, and you look up the record of registration, the following is what you more than likely will see:

Registrant. The person or company listed here is the owner of the domain name.

Administrative Contact. The person designated to receive email, mail, phone calls, etc. from the registrar relating to the administration of the domain name. May be the same as the registrant or the company the registrant works for.

Billing Contact. The person who will receive email, mail, phone calls, etc. from the registrar about renewing the domain name by paying the renewal registration fee. May be the same as the registrant or it could be the company that the registrant works for.

Technical Contact. The person who is designated to receive contact from the registrar about technical matters dealing with the domain name.

Record Expiration Date. The date the domain name will terminate unless the renewal fee has been paid. This will usually be at 12:01am on that date.

Record Creation Date. This is the original date the domain name was registered either to the current registrant or his or her predecessor.

When looking at the registration record, sometimes most of this information will not be there. Carefully look near the bottom of what is listed and there will probably be a comment that “for further information” you need to go to another web address. Go to that web address and you should find the information you need.

Obviously being the owner is important – if someone else places himself as the owner, (such as your web designer), he can always decide to charge you for the use of the name later, and there is little you can do unless you have a written contract. 

When the project is completed, most web designers will do the transfer automatically, but may simply forget. Just tactfully remind them if you need to and they will usually do it without any problems. It only takes about 24 hours for the transfer to take effect.

One last comment: Make sure you keep a record of your domain name and web hosting information, including the passwords to log onto the account. You  don’t want to miss renewing your domain name and web hosting thereby losing all of that time, money and effort.

You can’t go to any website without seeing some type of image on the site – pictures, logos, etc. Many of these are files which are loaded onto a web host server and then displayed when you browse the Internet. We are going to talk about how to set up images and have them show correctly, avoiding the situation when they sometimes do not look so good or don’t show up at all. In this article, we will refer to  pictures but generally applies to any graphic you add to a website.

Start With High Resolution Pictures

For pictures to show well on the Internet, you should begin with quality high-resolution digital pictures.  The best display will come from pictures taken with a digital camera although you can scan them in and still come out with good images. When you download those pictures onto your computer, the files are digital and usually in a “print quality” resolution, meaning they will be 300 dpi or better.

Tip: ”dpi” is dots per inch and refers to resolution.  As a standard for the Internet, pictures should be loaded onto the web at 72 dpi. If you want to print that great picture, it should be a minimum of 300 dpi.

Another Tip: If you have to scan in a picture, make sure you set your scanner settings to 300 dpi. That way you will get a good file you can use to upload with.

You want to start with high resolution pictures even though you will reduce the dpi to 72 when you load them onto the Internet. Why? Because you may need to “crop” (trim) or enhance the photo before you save it to upload. That way you will not lose any of the picture quality.

Use the Right Code

Putting pictures on a web page requires a specific code in the web page. The standard HTML code format to show a picture is:

[<] [img src=] ["images/myhouse.jpg"] [border="0" width="170" height="200"] [alt="this is a photo of my house"] [>]

(When putting in the code, do not use the brackets. We just put them there in this example to help in describing each part of the code. )

The [<] in the example is called an opening tag and the [>] is the closing tag for the code. You have to put them in for the code to work.

[img src=] is the abbreviation for image source. This tells the computer that the information following img src= shows what the characteristics of the picture are.

["images/myhouse.jpg"] tells the computer the folder where the copy of the picture is stored. myhouse.jpg is the name of the picture file stored in the folder images/.  The apostrophes are required. When your website files are uploaded onto your web host server, you usually load a folder that shows all of your graphics, pictures, etc. The name of that folder is what is going to show first, followed by a / and then the picture file name. The picture can be a .jpg, .tiff, or .gif, and that should also match the actual file name.

Tip: If you upload your pictures along with the website files without putting the pictures in a folder, then you would only show the name of the picture file, i.e., “myhouse.jpg” without the images/ or the /.

[border="0" width="170" height="200"] tells the computer what picture size you want to show on the website and whether or not you want to show a border around the picture. The “170″ says the picture is 170 pixels wide and  “200″ says the picture is 200 pixels in height. The number of pixels (the standard measurement of photos) will vary depending on the size you want to show. The “0″ after border= says you do not want a border. 

Tip: You want to make sure that the width and height in the code matches your actual picture width and height or it might show up looking distorted, stretched or scrunched up.

[alt="this is a photo of my house"] serves several purposes. With today’s technology, those persons who are visually impaired may use software to “read” websites. By putting this code in, which is now a coding standard, the software will read the picture code and then tells the user what it is. Secondly, a side benefit is  it helps the person working on the picture codes  to identify which picture they are working on.

How We Get Photos Ready

As a web designer, we use Adobe Photoshop to work on pictures, images, logos, etc.  Once we know where the picture is to be placed, we determine the size it can be and then re-size it to fit the space.

Sometimes we have to “crop” (trim) the picture. For instance, we might have a real estate agent who wants to show off a picture of a house he wants to sell. Looking at the picture, for whatever reason, the house isn’t  centered in the photo and there is a lot of trees, sky, etc. What we would do is take the photo and trim it so that the house is in the center of the picture. We always trim before we reduce the dpi of the photo to keep the resolution quality of the photo. Once it is set the way we want, we then “save for the web” at 72 dpi, upload the photo file where needed and make sure the code matches.

Note: When reducing any photo resolution down to 72 dpi, the actual size of the photo will also change to smaller numbers. So it is important to make sure the width and height matches in the coding after the photo is set up for the website.

And there you have it. Questions? Feel free to email us about any questions you might have and we will see what we can do for you. Thanks for stopping by.

Since Web Designs by LAO has been in business for a full year now, we decided we wanted to start sharing information we have accumulated.  Since there is such a huge amount of information available on the web, we want to provide “plain English”  segments dealing with web design and the web design industry. Hopefully, that will help you sort things out and make it clearer to understand.

There are an endless number of possibilities, styles and techniques that go into a website, so there will be plenty for us to write about.  We’ll post bi-monthly (or more frequently as time allows) on topics that we hope you’ll find interesting, informative, and useful.

If you have a question, please don’t hesitate to ask. If there is a specific subject you would like our opinion on, or would like us to research, feel free to let us know.

Thanks for visiting and we hope this is mutually beneficial!

Lisa-Ann and Robert