An old issue was raised on a forum recently and it caused me to go digging for more information. The question of who owns copyright for a web design. As a legal secretary AND a web designer, this is an issue near and dear to my cold little heart.

Work for Hire

Most employers, folks who retain our services to create web designs for them, prefer to view our products as works made for hire. And generally they are, if several criteria can be met. First, and most important, there MUST BE a work for hire agreement or an assignment of our copyrights to our creative works to that employer. Both bona fide employees and independent contractors (such as web design firms and free lance web designers) can usually be considered to be employees for the purposes of “works made for hire.”

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If you bill your time, you’ll appreciate this video. It’s not just for lawyers anymore! The video was created by the fine folks running Negotiation Law Blog. The song, based on Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time, written and performed by the Bar & Grill Singers.

That’s not only a great line from the movie Clerks, and the title to this article, it’s something you definitely don’t want to be.

The good thing about free enterprise is that you are free to decline a job that you perceive to be beyond the scope of your expertise, that will take more time than you have to spare, or otherwise is not cost-effective for you to undertake. And also simply because you have a gut feeling that the customer is going to be more trouble than he’s worth. So how do you get on this short list? Easy. Just do any one or more of the following, which I see quite often at a lot of the ‘lance sites:

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Last week, I talked about what a great application WordPress is for the solo professional or small business owner. It’s easier than ever before to create a professional web site with just WordPress and a few handy tools. (Of course if you really want a site that knocks their socks off, it would be money well spent to hire a web designer to create a professional design and pull all the pieces together for you!)

Whether you roll up your sleeves and do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you, you should think about employing at least these five plugins to help drive traffic to your site, to add functionality to your site or to otherwise enhance it so that the visitor’s experience is the best. If visitors to your site don’t like what they see, or if the information they seek is not easily attainable (read: no more than two mouse clicks away), they won’t stay. And what’s worse, they won’t return.

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