Hi Reader!

A friend of mine had a website built for her a couple years ago, and she loved it. It worked well for her audience for a long time.

Then her business shifted, the way every business eventually does. She had new events to promote and new photos she wanted to swap in, the kind of update that should really only take ten minutes, tops!

So she logged in to make the changes, and she couldn't. She didn't have real access, and she didn't even know where anything lived on the backend, because nobody had ever walked her through it.

Here's the thing. This isn't rare, and it isn't really about her at all. It's about how the website was built and handed off in the first place.

I hear some version of this story constantly!! It's usually with WordPress sites built on custom code or page builders nobody trained the owner on. Lately I'm seeing it show up in a new place too, which is AI built websites.

An AI built site can launch fast, and if there's real strategy behind it, it can turn out great. But that speed doesn't mean much if you can't get back in to change something six weeks later. If every edit means writing a new prompt and hoping the result matches what you had before, that's something worth knowing upfront, not after you're already stuck.

I go deeper on this in this week's episode of Website Design Made Simple, and you can listen here: Before you Build (or Buy) a Website, Ask This [Ep 143]​

Your website isn't a one time project, it's a living thing that needs to shift as your business does, and you should always be the one who gets to shift it.

If you're building a site or working with someone right now, it's worth asking a few simple questions along the way. Will you have full admin access from day one? Can you edit text, photos, and layout without touching code? And will someone actually walk you through it, or at least leave you something to reference later?

If you already feel stuck in a website you can't touch, you're allowed to ask your designer for access in writing, or for a quick video showing how to make a specific change. Most of the time, that conversation is a lot easier than it feels going in.

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You've got this,

P.S. If any of those questions made you a little uneasy, that feeling is worth listening to.