Thanks for this. I am a designer and often have new clients who have fallen victim to such nonsense. One of your tips about domains registered in their name woke me up a bit, see I often register domains of my clients behalf and my program automatically adds my contact info to everything! Just a bit of laziness on my part.
I do ask that clients use my hosting simply becasue of the environment that I'm used to as well as the fact that I am much for willing to give them more "free" service, because they're renting space from me for $11-$16.50 per month. In other words, I really enjoy changing some text on a page for a client or finding a better photo for them then telling them "no charge". It's sort of a numbers game. If you've got 100 people paying you $11 per month and 90 of them require zero effort during a particular month, but 10 of them need 5 minutes of tweaks or edits, you can do this and still profit just fine and give fantastic service.
definitely on the templates. I SORT of use templates but they're not REALLY tempaltes, they're just the basic outline of the website organized so I just have to add my hand created headers, etc. But DO stay away from "photoshop" templates. I cannot edit one of those things to save my life and they're not particularly seo friendly
SEO guarantees, etc. is the big one. People who are not "web saavy" will say things like "I can't find my site on the net" so you have to be very patient with them and upfront and clear on the expectations. I've lost a few sales simply because I've refused to give guarantees and I tend to "undersell" this service if anything. Promise a little and deliver alot so they're pleasantly surprised.
Thanks again for taking the time to educate. I have tons more i could add but time is short.
My site is
Maine Web Design - Central Maine Web by the way!