This is a bit off topic of SEO but I thought this would be a good tip for everyone.I have seen this several times when dealing with new clients. They spend boatloads of money for a site that is created in either flash or dynamic (Asp.net, php, Coldfusion) and they don’t have access to the source files. I can remember one client in particular who was a home builder. They were a rather large company and had one guy in the organization running all of their web stuff, marketing, IT etc. because no one else knew anything. They knew how to build homes. The CEO would basically write a check over and think this guy was doing his job.

It comes to light that this guy was embezzling most of the money so the CEO needed to get him out very slowly because they weren’t sure what this guy would do. They then contacted the company I was working for at the time to do SEO but they wanted hosting and eventually a site redesign.

When myself and a collegue attempted to sort out this mess, we uncovered some interesting things. First, this guy had all of the domains to the company in HIS name with his billing info! We explained to the CEO that at any time he could hijack their online corporate identity and they couldn’t do anything about it. Next, he was running Google Analytics and never reported or explained any of the info to anyone.

Anyways, there are a bunch of other shady things this guy did but that is beside the point. Ok, now here is where I actually go into the reason for the title. The company I was working for was in talks with this company to do a site rebuild which would bring in decent amount. The site was built in Asp.net and it turns out none of the .dll’s were there (these are the main files that make pages run correctly). We contacted the CEO and he was like, “um, what the hell is a .dll”? (yeah, i just figured out that rhymed.) So after we contact the embezzler, turns out he had one of his buddies build the site.

After a few weeks back and forth we just contacted the developer at his company. His boss came on the phone and said “yes, we do have the original .dll source files and own the rights to them.” He explained that the original contract from two years ago explicitly states the web development company owns the rights to these. So were were like, “we need these to do this redesign.” They said, no problem, that will be an extra $5000 for those. What????!!!!!

We let the CEO know about this and he frantically was rifling around his office for the contract. After hours of reading through the legal mumbo jumbo, it did state on page 156 line 74 (not really but I thought that was about right for a contract) that “xxx Inc does rightfully own in its entirety the original source files of the aforementioned website.”

And you ask why would this particular company do this? Well, turns out this is pretty standard in the web development business, most likely because they can.

They are the creators of this product and ultimately hold the rights to that creation. But where do you draw the line in this case? What incentive does the web dev company have in turning the files over for free? Their former client is going to someone else for a redesign. If the client went back to the original web site creator for a redesign, I’m sure they would do it extremely cheap. That’s just the way of doing business.

So you ask, what ultimately happened? They were just going to go back to the original web dev. company and have then redesign the site but before that happened, it came to light the finances of this company were so messed up, they filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

So is this a lesson learned? Make sure to read and understand all of your web related contacts before you sign on the dotted line.