In the world of business today it is imperative you have a well thought out and effective digital presence. To be successful, which is the obvious reason to go into business in the first place, there is no way around this fact.
When creating your website if you do not have a well-planned strategy to register, organize, and keep track of your accounts and multiple services you can quickly run into problems. In most cases, you will also need to add others to your accounts so that they can create and manage them.
Without a well laid out strategy, you risk being locked out of your accounts or worse losing ownership to someone you put your trust in to help you. Since creating and managing your digital accounts is so important I will provide you with the necessary information you need to effectively and efficiently handle the process.
Getting started
To begin with, you need first to create a master email account with a third party. Your third-party master account will make it easy for you to share your accounts with website developers and anyone else required to help in the creation of your digital accounts.
Google’s Gmail is one of the best and easiest to use a third-party email account. The free version of the Gmail account is excellent to share with your team members, allowing you and them access to great Google services such as Google Analytics.
Another helpful feature of the Gmail account is that it allows you to add dots to your email address. The ability to add dots to your email address means you can keep the account organized by adding your website address in the email address. For example, you can create an email address like webmaster.mybusiness@gmail.com.
Registering your business’s account
After you set up your master email account, you can then proceed to register all of your digital accounts including your:
- Domain name
- Web hosting
- Social media accounts
- Tools and more
Safeguarding your accounts
While setting the passwords for your accounts, never use the same password for more than one account. Most often it becomes difficult for people to remember passwords for the different digital accounts in their life, so they usually use one password for every account they open, including their financial accounts.
Using the same password for more than one account is an extremely bad idea. If a hacker figures out a password to an account you have, the first thing they do it to try that same password on your other accounts.
Your accounts will be much more secure if you instead use a password management service like 1Password to help keep track of all your passwords. A password management service will keep your accounts much safer, especially your business accounts which you can’t afford to have hacked.
When using a password management service use a two-factor authentication option when available to double your security. When registering your accounts make sure to add only your ownership and contact details, not those of your developer.
Some services will give you the option of adding separate sub-accounts, so you can add additional team members that you want to have access to your account so they can be involved in the creation and management of the site.
When you do share access to your accounts with developers and other team members, who require access to build and manage your accounts, always make sure to change the password when the tasks are complete.
If you require an account manager to have frequent access to your accounts, which is common, then make sure you use a password that is not used for any other account (which you should be doing anyway).
WordPress
WordPress is one of the easiest most impressive sites to use when creating an effective business website. The options for themes, plugins, applications and a whole host of other helpful options the site has made creating any type of business website virtually effortless.
When creating your site on WordPress, make sure you register yourself as the Administrator. Some developers will prefer the business owner to register as a contributor, so you do not have access to the more technical aspects of the WordPress site.
If this is the case, register a separate account that you can use to log in. You can also use your Gmail master email account as well. Even in regards to your domain name, it is crucial to register using your details. Also, keep your registration details current.
In some cases, a developer will need to register an account for you, or you may choose to let them handle the whole process which includes registering accounts for you. Your developer handling these steps on their own is fine as long as you have them use your details when registering.
Organizing all your accounts
As you proceed with the process of creating all of the accounts you will require for your business, make a list of all of them. Create and maintain this file containing a list of all the accounts as you create them online, so you can easily access it from anywhere.
A Google document file works well for this, but make sure you don’t include the login details for each account and especially not any of the passwords or even hints for the passwords.
In Conclusion
This approach to creating your business accounts will easily save you from experiencing some serious headaches and some less than honest developers who may try to hold your account hostage literally.
Even though most freelance developers are honest, hard-working people there are always crooked people in every area of business. You also want always to be careful with any of your business information, as well as your personal information no matter what you do because identity theft is a real and serious crime that has plagued many businesses and people.
This approach will also safeguard you against the more common problem of merely forgetting your login information and being locked out of your accounts. If you are the only person holding the virtual keys to your business accounts, what happens when you forget?
Michael D. Turashoff 