[Hidden-tech] who owns a website?

[B. Melville]

Other points:

Check the whois (Network Solutions) for the legal registrant of the 
domain name. Designers will often list themselves as the registrant 
rather than the person or company for whom they made the website. If 
the designer gets crabby, he or she might not allow you to change the 
registrant. Although this is slightly different from ownership of the 
graphic design and the code, it can certainly muddy the waters.

We also had a situation where we were stuck because the original 
registrant (a designer) had gone out of business and disappeared, 
leaving us with no way to change the registration.

A website is considered to be an asset of a business, and can be sold 
or not sold. We just sold a business, and the website (separate from 
the domain names) was listed as an asset to be transferred to the new 
owner.

If you are changing designers, I assume that you are changing the 
look and some of the coding functionality of the site. If you are the 
registrant of the domain name, you can start a new site using that 
name. If you wrote the content copy (the text) on the site, you can 
also take that to the new site. You should check with a lawyer before 
re-using the graphic look of a site (although a new designer would 
likely be re-designing the look anyway). If the site was built on an 
open source template, you might have no problem. If it was designed 
from the ground up, though, check with a lawyer. Same goes for the 
coding of the site.

So essentially there are 4 parts to a website, each of which could 
conceivably be owned by a different person or business - the domain 
name, the text content, the graphic design, and the coding.