--- title: "Vacations and Website Maintenance: Navigating the Challenges of Time Off" date: 2020-05-19T05:00:00-04:00 author: Sean Smith canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-5/vacations/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Season 03 Episode 5 – May 19, 2020 33:44 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Vacations and Website Maintenance: Navigating the Challenges of Time Off  0:00 0:00 1.0x 0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-03/04-Vacations-Master.mp3) In this episode, we discuss the challenges of vacations for web developers and their clients, offering advice on how to prepare for potential emergencies, setting expectations, and effective communication. ### Show Notes - web developer should have a system in place for vacations - logins/passwords available for backup person - Define emergency work - Plan important work for before or after vacations - when the client goes on vacation what are their responsibilities? Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi, and welcome to the website 101 Podcast. I'm Sean Smith, your co-host, and with me, as always, is Mike Mele. Hey, Sean. What's up? Hey, Mike. And today, we're going to be talking about vacations. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. What to do when your web developer or agency goes on vacation? So if you're working with a developer, it might be a small team. just one or two people, if they go on vacation, what do you do? Yeah. What happens if something happens to your website? So that's our topic for today. What are your first thoughts on this? **\[00:39\]** **Mike:** Yeah, this is a thing that it's going to affect anybody who works with another person with regard to keeping their website up to date and managed. And it's something that clients often do worry about, because sometimes some of the stuff that the developers do are things that the client just cannot do. They're not trained to do that kind of Cody stuff and they wanna make sure that they can account for that when the person’s gone away. So we're gonna talk about that a little bit. So yeah, as far as what advice we have, I would say one of the first things I would try to recommend is make sure that your web developer has a system in place that allows him to take vacations and still continue to maintain your site in whatever way is necessary. So by that I mean, maybe he needs to have a workflow that he can sort of hand off to another developer and that person can take over while he's gone. So that would include things like, I mean, without getting too technical, things like, you know, a Git repo which allows someone to sort of jump in and just continue the work where he left off, backups, things like that. And make sure that the developer has all of the passwords or log-ins or whatever available to hand off to that developer so he can take over. And make sure that the developer has all of the passwords or log-ins or whatever available to hand off to that developer so he can take over. **\[02:09\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I think that's a good point. And part of the reason we decided to do this topic was earlier this year, I was going on vacation and I notified all my clients ahead of time that, hey, it's going to be emergency work only from day one to day last of my vacation. And one of the clients came back and said, well, you know, what happens if we have an emergency? And I was like, well, you know, I'm going to have my laptop with me. And I'll be checking it mornings and evenings. But I'm not going to do any work unless it's a true emergency. It's supposed to be a vacation after all. Yeah, exactly. And I know that a lot of smaller agencies or solo developers have trouble taking vacations. They like to be always available for their clients, or maybe their clients have expectations that they’re always available. Myself, on the other hand, I like to set limits. Yeah. But I want to be reasonable about it. So, you know, if your website explodes and it's down, that is a clear-cut emergency. Or if there's some key functionality that's broken, broken, that's a clearer emergency. And I'm going to work on that and I’ll miss out on my vacation and do what I have to because that’s my responsibility. However, if you want to change the color of a headline, or start work on a new future, that is not an emergency. That is something that, you know, that's just better planning. Planet before the vacation or planet for after the vacation. It's like setting priorities. Myself, on the other hand, I like to set limits. Yeah. But I want to be reasonable about it. So, you know, if your website explodes and it's down, that is a clear-cut emergency. Or if there's some key functionality that's broken, broken, that's a clearer emergency. **\[03:54\]** **Mike:** Right. Right. And so yeah, exactly planning ahead of time is crucial. So in the same way that when people go on vacation to plan the vacation, you know, it's not like people don't usually say, I'm going on vacation starting an hour from now. I'll see you in two weeks. It's usually they know it well in advance. So share that information with your client, with your developer, and talk about it well in advance so that you can come up with a plan. Okay, during those two weeks or whatever it is, what's gonna get done? What work do we need done? Do we need to change the colors of headings? Because maybe we should get it done before you go on vacation, things like that, right? **\[04:32\]** **Sean:** Right, and if you need to have a site update because you've got a key event. Maybe there's a conference coming up or you're having a big seasonal sale or something for your website. Well, these sort of things need to be planned ahead of time. And just like your developer is gonna plan their vacation, doing a last minute thing is not gonna work for any new functionality in need. So we need to do that. So let's talk about what You and I both do when we're scheduling our vacations. Okay. So, you know, what do we typically do when going on vacation? Now for myself, obviously, I'm going to notify my clients as far in advance as possible. So, you know, when I've got my plane tickets booked or whatever I'm doing, I'm going to let them know at least a month ahead of time, yep, at a minimum. And then I'm going to say, look, it's no scheduled work. We'll have to work around this. And emergency only. And at this point, we kind of need to just define what an emergency is. Yes, absolutely. Which I sort of hit on. Mike, is there anything else that you do when you go on vacation with your clients? **\[05:50\]** **Mike:** So one of the, so yeah, you're right. Plan work in advance is a good thing. If work is something that, you know, it's an ongoing thing with this website, and you tend to do work week to week on it, then if someone's going to be away for a couple of weeks, you know, account for that and say, okay, whatever we were going to do then, let's do it either before or after, but plan it out. So that's important. Tell them in advance that you're going on vacation, of course, is also important. Another thing I would say is determine what forms of communication are acceptable between the client and the developer during the vacation. **\[06:26\]** **Sean:** So what do you mean by that, like, what form? **\[06:29\]** **Mike:** So if you mentioned earlier that an emergency, and we'll get back to the emergency thing in a second, I guess, but if it's OK, if you determine, OK, it's OK to contact me on vacation when there's an emergency, because I will deal with that. How are you allowed to contact me? Because some people, you know, if I'm at the cottage and I'm at some kind of barbecue with my family or something, I don't necessarily want my phone ringing. I might say something like, okay, I will check my email every single day, every morning, and maybe I can guarantee that I will get your messages at least on the day, no later than a day, late. Things like that, I mean, it depends on the situation, of course, maybe it is acceptable to hand out phone numbers and have people texting you all the time, and I don't know, but it's something that you have to agree on, you, the client and the developer, what is an acceptable form of communication during this period? And that's even if you don't do the emergency thing, no matter what type of workflow you agree on, decide on how are we going to connect with each other while someone is on vacation. **\[07:35\]** **Sean:** Right. Well, for myself, I don't give my cell phone number out to my clients. Did I have a separate business line? So they're not going to be able to reach me by phone. And even if I did, I don't want my clients to be calling me when I'm overseas on vacation. What if I'm in Italy or Mexico on my vacation? The long distance charges for that is going to be crazy. **\[08:02\]** **Mike:** Not to mention your phone might ring at three o'clock in the morning, depending on where you are. **\[08:06\]** **Sean:** Yeah, and time changes is an issue as well. So I don't think that anything other than email is an appropriate method for contact. **\[08:19\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I mean, I guess it also depends on what form of contact You're used to having with the client if if you're working with the client I had one once where we used to contact she used to contact me on WhatsApp periodically that texting app because I forget what the reason was there was something that was Time sensitive frequently. We agreed. Okay, you can you can text me on WhatsApp and if I'm available I'll hop on to my computer and we'll continue the conversation that way So if you have a relationship like that that's great but the point is decide in advance because you don't want to like really infuriate someone by interrupting whatever it is they're doing on vacation when it's not welcome. Right okay so let's talk **\[09:05\]** **Sean:** what are if for example I am going out to like deep bush country northern Ontario or somewhere where there's not likely to be a good internet available to me. Like, you know, camping somewhere, or you're going on some sort of adventure vacation, maybe hiking the Appalachian Trail, or I don't know. **\[09:28\]** **Mike:** Some people don't even take their phones on vacation, I'm told. **\[09:31\]** **Sean:** So if you mentioned earlier that an emergency, and we'll get back to the emergency thing in a second, I guess, but if it's OK, if you determine, OK, it’s OK to contact me on vacation when there's an emergency, because I will deal with that. How are you allowed to contact me? Because some people, you know, if I'm at the cottage and I'm at some kind of barbecue with my family or something, I don't necessarily want my phone ringing. I might say something like, okay, I will check my email every single day, every morning, and maybe I can guarantee that I will get your messages at least on the day, no later than a day, late. Things like that, I mean, it depends on the situation, of course, maybe it is acceptable to hand out phone numbers and have people texting you all the time, and I don't know, but it's something that you have to agree on, you, the client and the developer, what is an acceptable form of communication during this period? And that's even if you don't do the emergency thing, no matter what type of workflow you agree on, decide on how are we going to connect with each other while someone is on vacation. How are you allowed to contact me? Because some people, you know, if I'm at the cottage and I’m at some kind of barbecue with my family or something, I don't necessarily want my phone ringing. **\[11:12\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and in that case, I believe what happened is, I just said, I know what they're asking for, they just wanted some colors change somewhere. And I said, I can hop on and do this. And I thought it'd be... **\[11:22\]** **Sean:** But cliche, changing the colors. **\[11:24\]** **Mike:** Yeah, exactly. But that's literally what it was, I think. So yeah, I just made the changes, and there were a couple of hiccups here and there, but basically it worked as we expected because of that sort of planning workflow that we had. And yeah, it worked out okay, and I did them, And that was the only thing that they really asked me for. So it was fine. **\[11:42\]** **Sean:** Because they didn't have any emergencies. And I think afterwards, you may have talked to them and said, that wasn't a real emergency. Or maybe I sent them an email. It's been a few months, so I don't really know. **\[11:54\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I don't recall either. But yeah, that's the point we'll take in, yeah. It's important to decide. **\[12:00\]** **Sean:** Yeah, we need to set limits on, especially as the backup. You know, you have your own client work. Yes. It's not expected that you're going in and doing future updates on my client sites. You're there in case their site exploded and I wasn't available. **\[12:16\]** **Mike:** That's a great point. Yeah, we didn't really stress that. Is that, yeah, when we say backup, if I get Sean as my backup, it's not like Sean drops everything and is sitting there waiting for my client to contact him about anything. It's not like that. It's still an emergency situation where he would end up taking on more work than he had planned, things like that. So generally, when you get a backup guy, he's not there to do 100% of the other guy's work. He's just there when absolutely needed because of, you know, well, emergencies, we keep saying emergencies, but that's typically what people want done when someone's on vacation, right? **\[12:57\]** **Sean:** Okay. So I think we kind of hit on a lot of the big things that your developer needs to do and maybe asking for a backup might be the right thing for you. But the next question is, what about when the client goes on vacation, what are their responsibilities to the developer? Personally, I think if they don't have any ongoing projects, they don't need to tell us. Because if they don't have any ongoing work, why do they need to tell us about that? **\[13:31\]** **Mike:** That they're going on vacation, you mean? Tell us that? **\[13:33\]** **Sean:** Yeah. But if you're working on building out a whole new section or revamping the design or whatever it is, and then your main contact goes on vacation for two weeks, I don't know. **\[13:47\]** **Mike:** Hi, hope you're enjoying this episode. We're always looking for topics suggestions from listeners, so if there's anything you'd like us to discuss in the future, please let us know. **\[13:56\]** **Sean:** We're also looking for guests. If you know somebody who would make a great guest, If you think you would be a good guest, please let us know. You can reach out to us at website 101podcast.com slash contact. **\[14:10\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I can also think of some others. So I have some clients that are on maintenance contract retainers where they get me to update their site with content every so often or whatever it is. And it could be, so a scenario, I don't know if this is actually happening or not, but let's say it has, where they're on vacation, I'm making an update and say I need to use a particular photo for this blog entry. And I want to use one, but I need to know if we have the authorization to use that photo. Maybe it's from another site that they work with a lot or whatever. And I have some kind of question like that for the client. I want to make this change, but do I have the right to use this photo, for example, in this blog post, if I send an email and then I get a vacation reminder, hey, I'm on vacation for two weeks, see when I get back, then I'm like, okay, well, I'm not sure how I should address that issue. So there's that. And one way, by the way, to deal with that is what people do often say in their little auto reply emails is if this is urgent contact, so and so. And with your question and they'll handle it so that they get their own backup person right sometimes. **\[15:26\]** **Sean:** I do that right, but that doesn't you don't always get that off **\[15:29\]** **Mike:** You don't always get that and also the person doing the backup for the client often doesn't have the same knowledge Or authority, so maybe that person would be that I don't know if you're allowed to use that photo **\[15:41\]** **Sean:** I've never really dealt with that client or whatever it is so yeah, in which case these sort of things can lead to delays in the project So if we can't proceed, then it's going to delay the project and you might not get done on time. Hopefully it doesn't happen, but this is comes back to planning. So if you're going to go on vacation and you've got ongoing work going on on your website, you need to talk to your developer or your agency and say, hey, I'm going to be gone for two weeks. Is there anything you're going to likely going to need? Exactly. Do you need a contact? What do they need to know? So we want to make people as prepared as possible. Yep, that's right. In any case, vacations is a bit of an issue in the industry for developers, especially with solo guys like myself and Mike, you know, we're one person shops. And while preparing for this episode, I posted on Twitter and in a discord channel that I'm active in asking people what they do when they go on vacation for their clients, so Erwin Heiser on Twitter said, I put on my out-of-office message but I bring my laptop and check mail daily. Quick fixes I do on the spot. Anything that's going to take longer than say a few hours gets delay. Rarely had an issue with clients on this. Most important thing is to be reachable. And I would agree with that. Yeah, I mean, you need to be reachable, **\[17:15\]** **Mike:** important things, bigger things can wait. Yeah, I guess it depends on, see, there's a lot of sort of moving parts to this because I mean, he says he brings my, his laptop and I know a lot of guys have laptops. I don't. I have a giant 24 inch, you know, desktop computer that I, I mean, honestly, sometimes I do take it with me, but depending on where I'm going, if I'm going to the, to the, to the out, to the outback, like we talked about earlier, I don't drag my computer with me. So that's not even an option for me, even if I did want to do that, to take my work with me like that. So it really does depend on, again, the developer, the client, the relationship you have. So some people are into just continuing the work because it's whatever they can just do it from the road. Other people, not so much. **\[17:57\]** **Sean:** What have you done in the past when you had a client emergency while you were on vacation and you didn't have access to your computer? **\[18:04\]** **Mike:** You know, so it frequently, I mean, fortunately it doesn't happen very frequently, it doesn't happen often that there's an emergency. I can recall years ago, because so I grew up in another province here in Canada than where I'm living now and my family still lives back there. So I often go back there for the holidays or what have you. And I can remember sometimes firing up my dad's computer in his office and say, hey, can And I just log into whatever and do some work here. This was back in the day when we used FTP and old school updating methods that would be much easier done then, which is kind of ironic, but anyways. So I have memories of doing that, but very few. Usually there's not emergencies and I think moving forward my preferred plan will be the backup guy, which often will be you probably if you're into it. I think that's a good way to address the emergency work. You know, just, you deal with it if you can't. If you can't, you reach me and then I'll find a way around it. **\[19:09\]** **Sean:** Yeah, interestingly, in September, we both went to the same conference. I had a laptop and you didn't. Yep. Yeah, I told my clients that there was no backup this time because my cause is also going to the conference. **\[19:24\]** **Mike:** I took the backup with me on this vacation. What's up, what's the vacation day guys? **\[19:29\]** **Sean:** Yeah, but it's still it's the same as vacation because you're unavailable, you know, we're gone from Wednesday to Friday of that week at a conference and I think, you know, any client is going to understand when you're going to a conference, it's professional development and, you know, the same thing with vacations. You're going to understand that. Everybody needs to get away and reenergize to serve them better. Yep. And that's actually reminded me. So **\[19:56\]** **Mike:** during that same period, I think the week after I went to back to Prince Edward Island because I used to play in a rock band and we were playing a show there. And on that day, I remember we had rehearsal, we had sound check, we had the actual gig, and I was unavailable for any work of any kind for the entire day. Now nothing came up, but I'm just saying that's an example where even if you can to reach the developer, it's not like that person can within an hour hop on to a computer. They could be on the road, they could be whatever, I drove there actually in the summer and it takes two days to drive there, so I literally cannot sit at a computer and do work during that period. So sometimes even if you can reach them, you need to be able to accept that, well, it's not going to happen right away. **\[20:43\]** **Sean:** Okay, so let's get back to some of these Twitter and Discord messages. The next one I got listed here is from AtKerryHD and she says, it depends on how long. If it's up to a week, I tell them I'm off and we'll get back to them when I'm back. Sounds like me. If it's over a week, I plan one, two, three days and times I will check in and work for an hour and two and let clients know and put it in my, oh, oh, out of office, reply, either way I plan for the break. So this is somewhat similar to me, Mike. **\[21:24\]** **Mike:** Yeah, that's sort of similar to what I do. Just try to kind of come up with this midpoint where it's like, OK, I am on vacation, so I'm not going to be working the same way as normal. But if I can check in periodically and maybe do some work periodically, that kind of thing. **\[21:41\]** **Sean:** Right. Darryl Knight, he's very active in the discordant Twitter community. And he says, so far, I've just dealt with it by never going on vacation, by never going on vacation. That's an interesting approach. Darrell, I don't think this is a great approach. You're just going to be burnt out. If it works for him, that's cool. Yeah. But I know it's not just Darrell because if you do any sort of search for freelancer in any industry, so many people just don't take vacations and work crazy crazy crazy hours. So I think this is **\[22:18\]** **Mike:** an important thing to address. It's probably in a lot of cases it's important to set a precedent with your clients and say look I do take vacations just like everybody else so you need to expect that just because I'm a freelancer doesn't mean that I'm you know strapped to my computer 24 hours a day you know. Right so I'm I don't want to read this one from Nick. Did you have anything else to say about Daryl's comment? **\[22:44\]** **Sean:** No, no, hit up. **\[22:45\]** **Mike:** Okay, so Nick says, I take my laptop with me, but let them know that I'm away. It is a problem though. My wife likes to go away a few times a year, so have to deal with it somehow. Well, that's, that's, again, that's reasonable. My wife's always pressured to take a vacation. Totally reasonable. Luckily, I've never had any real emergencies while away. A few things I've even sorted out using my phone. Now, I wanted to address that one because this is another example of it depends on the workflow that you're able to agree to with your clients. Personally, I would never want a client thinking that as long as I have my phone on me, I can update their site. Because even if I can, I don't know if that's a precedent I wanna set that I'm so available as that. Because I mean, with the client themselves and anyone else who works at a computer, usually there's like a work life balance where at five o'clock or whatever, they shut things off and they go spend time with their family or whatever. So suddenly, if you're kind of saying, no, even when I'm away from the computer, I got my phone and I might have a tablet or I'm not sure I'm into that. But again, to each is own. **\[23:52\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I'm not sure what kind of issues you can sort out with your phone. It's not like you can edit code or FTP into the server or access your get repo using your phone. It's just not really going to be possible. best, I think you could reply to an email and explain how to do something. Maybe they forgot how to edit the entry or crop a photo or something. I think that's the best you could do. But, hey, maybe I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, Nick, please let us know what how to do that. Lindsay Dilleretto is, he had an interesting thought. He said, I've seen various proposed solutions for that problem, including client sharing, which is kind of what we've proposed. But it always seems to come back to what Nick said, i.e. just work, or what Darrell said, don't take vacations. Just try to time and Lindsay's solution is try to time your vacations during your client's off-season if possible. I think this idea is great in theory and that theory only works if you have only one client or all of your clients have the same **\[25:04\]** **Mike:** offseason or have an offseason at all I don't I have some clients that don't **\[25:07\]** **Sean:** they don't have an offseason like what is that right so you know I suppose you could try and arrange your vacation about a time that is traditionally lower volume for the bulk of your clients. I find that for the web development industry, the slow periods are usually the summer and Christmas. That's true. Normally that's true. Summer, a lot of people are on vacation. They don't have time to manage the project or answer questions. Same sort of thing happens at Christmas though. Sometimes you can have people get some individual projects might be a little bit different than that if there's something coming up that needs to be ready for January 1st or back to school in September here in North America, you know, something like that. **\[26:01\]** **Mike:** Yeah, that's the other thing is that if you have international clients, which I do, you know, some clients that are overseas, you know, they're busy and not busy times could be very different from here. I've also worked with American clients and had the issue where Thanksgiving comes up where it's Thanksgiving here in Canada, which is in October, but it's not Thanksgiving in the US until November. So when I'm on Thanksgiving break, they're just hard at work. So they're like, well, you know, they still want to contact me. So that, even that, like a holiday, you need to coordinate that as if it's someone on vacation, right? Yeah, I have a few American clients as well. **\[26:38\]** **Sean:** And every time that we have a Canadian specific holiday, I let them know. And I usually don't really remember until the weekend, just before the weekend, but, you know, for American and Canadian clients, most of our holidays are similar. I think there's two or three holidays that are **\[26:56\]** **Mike:** not the same, so, you know. And I see it works out. I do seem to remember that one of the, maybe it was the Thanksgiving one. There was one where we had a holiday and the Americans had a holiday as well at the same time, but it was a different one, like Columbus Day or something, I'm not sure how that goes, but I see you remember there being a couple where they're on the same day **\[27:16\]** **Sean:** They're just named different things or Canada day and and July and fourth. They're separated by three days, but it's all in the same week So nobody really wants to work anyways. Yeah, it's a whole week of celebrations. That's right. Yeah All right, so I'm gonna jump over to perhaps the last topic a Or last person Andrea She says I let them know ahead of time And if they want me to do anything before I go to let me know by X date. Yep, otherwise It will have to wait until I get back if I have interact internet access I'll tell them emergency only and and here she says site outage key functionality breaking So this kind of pulls back to what we talked about earlier. You know changing the colors or a full-on new project or Revamp of a section is not an emergency. Yep, define what an emergency is Yep, yeah, so we need to define what an emergency is and she goes on further to say it was off the grid for three weeks last year and was fortunate to not have had any emergencies. And she says the last time she had a site to go down for any length was when her hosting provider had a DNS issue. So it wasn't even there was nothing that she could do. The hosting had to take care of it. **\[28:33\]** **Mike:** Yeah, that's a good point, too, is that just sort of a high-level thing, make sure that your developer has a setup where the emergencies are few and far between. If you're working with a host where the site is always going offline because it's just not a very good host, that makes it more likely. Shared hosting. Yeah, I could drop some names here, but I won't. But yeah, that could make an emergency more likely to happen, so make sure that your dev is hooking your site up with the best and the brightest of what the web has to offer in terms of maintaining a website, right? **\[29:13\]** **Sean:** Exactly. So, I feel like we've kind of hit everything on this topic, but I do have a little bit of a bonus related topic that I want to hit on. Go for it. For two minutes. So you have digital assets as a business. What do who manages those assets, so it could be passwords to the website, passwords to where your domain is registered, your hosting passwords, all of these kinds of things. What, who has access to this, is somebody in your organization, oftentimes I find that clients have these things, but it was purchased by Joe in IT using his email address. address. And what happens when Joe quits or gets fired or otherwise leaves your aid your company? Well, you can't do password resets. You don't know the password to access any of these assets. It's really, really difficult. And I actually ran into this issue just this week where I'm working on a new client and We're rebuilding their site, but the old site, they didn't know how to access the server, and they weren't working with the previous developer. So we did get in touch with the previous developer. He gave us a couple of pointers, wasn't overly helpful, but he wasn't bad. And we finally did get access to it, but it delayed a lot of work. And what if we had not gotten access to it? So what I recommend that you do for any sort of digital assets is set up a unique email address and it could be something like digital dash assets or assets at your domain.com. Set up a password that is shared with everybody or available to only certain individuals. And when you need, when somebody leaves the company, you change the password to that email account so that they can't do anything after when they're gone. It's simple. Yeah. That's smart. And it's easy for everybody to have all of your information who's in a centralized location. **\[31:29\]** **Mike:** Right. Yeah, exactly. That's important to have everything. It's nothing more painful than, you know, saying, well, what's the, what's the, the, the login information for your super admin account that lets you change everything? Oh, well, this guy has it. What about the login for the hosting? I, I don't know. I think that was Susan over an accounting to care that way. Have it all in one place at least. And yeah, it's important that, as you say, when someone leaves the organization, make sure that person can no longer access that information. That's a safety concern, right? **\[32:00\]** **Sean:** Yeah. One time several years ago, even, I had a client who an ex-employee had access to all of this stuff because he had purchased it using his personal email account. **\[32:11\]** **Mike:** Right. **\[32:12\]** **Sean:** That happens to, yeah. It took the company a couple of weeks to track them down because they didn't they hadn't worked there for a couple of years already I mean he was He was perfectly willing to help out and give the Give access again, but that's a the kind of mistake **\[32:29\]** **Mike:** You don't want and what if he wasn't willing what if he was on bad terms with what if he got fired and he's the guy that built or got hit by a bus Yes, exactly suddenly becomes much more difficult to **\[32:40\]** **Sean:** Access that point. It's impossible. Yeah, because you're not gonna Nobody's going to do a password reset on a service that you're not the the primary account. That's right. Yep. So you need to make sure that you keep access to all of this stuff so that it stays within the company. Yeah. Centralized. **\[33:00\]** **Mike:** Good point. All right. Yeah. So anything, I think we've pretty much covered everything here. This was a good one. Yeah. **\[33:06\]** **Sean:** This was an excellent episode. Hey, thank you so much for listening to this episode. My name is Sean Smith. co-host and you can find me at my website, caffeinecreations.ca, on Twitter, caffeine creation, that's spelled C-A-F-F-E-I-N-E-C-R-E-A-T-I-O-N. And also I'm on LinkedIn, caffeine creations. **\[33:31\]** **Mike:** And I'm Mike Mella and you can find me online at blikewater.ca. And I'm also on LinkedIn and Twitter, my username is Mike Mella. That's M-I-K-E-M-E-L-L-A. Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? 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[![Listen on Google Play Music](/assets/images/google_podcasts_badge@2x.png)](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/itunes-badge.png)](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/spotify-logo.png)](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 03 - 1 [ Do You Really Need a Website](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-1/do-you-really-need-a-website/) - 2 [ Wordpress](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-2/wordpress/) - 3 [ How to Adapt During an Emergency: A Special Website 101 Podcast](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-3/adapting-during-an-emergency/) - 4 [ Video Marketing: Boosting Business with Video Content](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-4/using-video/) - 5 [ Vacations and Website Maintenance: Navigating the Challenges of Time Off](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-5/vacations/) - 6 [ There's a plugin for that](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-6/theres-a-plugin-for-that/) - 7 [ Backups: Why You Need Them and How to Implement Them](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-7/backups/) - 8 [ Using Custom Email Addresses: A Professional Touch for Your Business](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-8/email/) - 9 [ The Importance of Website Maintenance Plans and Retainers](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-9/maintenance-plans/) - 10 [ How to Conduct a Content Audit for Your Website](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-10/content-audits/) - 11 [ Own Your Content](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-11/own-your-content/) ### All Seasons - [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/) - [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/) - [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/) - [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/) - [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/) - [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/) - [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/) - [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/) - [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/) <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-END\]\]>