Our guides teach the support work that trades owners can do themselves, or should at least be able to check. Start with the emergency triage guide if your site is broken today. Otherwise, start with the ownership audit, then use the support plan guide to compare providers.
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Who owns your website? An access and ownership audit for trades
If you can't say who owns your domain, hosting, Google listing and ad accounts, you have a risk that no website design can fix. This audit takes an afternoon and gives you a one-page register.
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How to choose a website support plan for a trades business
A good support plan is defined by what it prevents, how clearly it reports, and who owns the accounts when you leave. Compare plans on those three points before you compare price.
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Your trades website is down: an emergency triage guide
Most website outages come from one of five layers: domain, DNS, hosting, certificate or site software. Check them in that order and you'll usually know within fifteen minutes who needs to fix it.
Website emergency triage
What it teaches: how to find which layer of your website failed when it goes down, shows a warning or gets hacked.
A website relies on five layers: domain, DNS, hosting, certificate and site software. The guide gives a symptom table so you can match what you see to the likely layer, then a step-by-step check of each one in the order that finds the cause fastest. It covers what to do while the site is down so calls still reach you, a worked example of what a few days offline can cost a roofing business in spring, and the mistakes that turn a small outage into a big one, such as paying a fake renewal notice.
Read it before you need it. It's much easier to follow calmly than in the middle of a busy morning with the phone silent.
Access and ownership audit
What it teaches: how to find every account behind your website and marketing, confirm your business owns each one, and build a one-page register.
Many trades businesses discover too late that their domain, hosting, Google Business Profile or ad accounts belong to a former employee, a freelancer or a past agency. The guide walks through every category of account, a simple register you can fill in, how to fix problem rows in order of risk, and how to keep access tidy afterwards. It includes a worked example of an electrical contractor's audit and the order in which they'd fix what they found.
This is the guide we'd most like every trades owner to read, because it prevents the hardest problems to solve.
Choosing a support plan
What it teaches: how to judge any website support plan, including ours, before you sign.
The guide explains what support is meant to do (prevent, keep accurate, repair, protect ownership), gives a scorecard of what a good plan includes, eight questions to ask any provider in writing, and red flags such as a provider registering your domain in their own name. A worked example for a plumbing company shows how to estimate whether support pays for itself at your call volume, and a short procedure covers switching providers without an outage.
How the guides connect to our services
Each guide matches one or more services, for owners who'd rather hand the work over:
- Emergency triage pairs with urgent website help.
- The ownership audit pairs with access recovery.
- The plan guide pairs with maintenance plans and marketing upkeep.
You don't need to hire anyone to use them. If you follow a guide and get stuck, call, text or email and tell us which step you reached. We pick up messages Mon–Fri 9–6 Pacific, usually replying within one business day.
Who these guides are for
They're written for the person who ends up dealing with the website in a trades business: usually the owner, sometimes an office manager or a family member who "knows computers". Each guide assumes you have little time and no developer on staff. They use plain terms, include tables you can print, and give worked examples with numbers you can swap for your own.
A note on accuracy
These guides describe general practice for websites and online accounts. Platforms such as registrars, hosts and Google change their menus and processes from time to time, so the exact button names may differ from what you see. When a step involves a platform's ownership or recovery process, use the platform's own help pages as the final word.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need technical skills to use these guides?
No. They're written for owners and office managers. Where a step needs technical help, the guide says so, and tells you what to ask for.
Which guide should I read first?
If your site is broken right now, the emergency triage guide. Otherwise, the ownership audit, because it protects you against the most expensive problems.
Are these guides kept up to date?
Each shows the date it was last updated. If a platform changes how something works, we revise the guide and the date.