Websites, logo files and social media accounts are all part of what we at Rockpool call your digital property. We have spent a large portion of this week troubleshooting for clients who had access issues – access to their own digital property.
As a general rule of thumb, when we set up profiles/websites for you we will request that we have an email address to allow senior admin access to.
Due to many not realising that these are tangible, essential assets to your company.
Would you allow a new inexperienced member of staff with ‘L plates’ to have the keys to your brand new Bentley? Or would you allow a member of staff who quits or is let go to have company keys to your shop?
Regardless of whether or not these a physical, tangible asset, does not mean that they are worth any less in value.
Let’s will run through some examples for you to see exactly what we mean in real terms –
A new Facebook pixel based, retargeting lookalike advert has been created for one of our clients, upon request to their ad account it transpires that unfortunately, the original Facebook page for that company has three editors, however it does not have any admin roles.
This is due to a member of staff (who originally set up the page) leaving the company, and removing themselves.
They are now in the hands of Facebook help, awaiting to see if anything can be done to rectify this. Unfortunately is it unlikely they can, at this stage rectify this extremely important issue!
Admins are the most senior role you can have for a Facebook page due to the fact a Facebook page is a public owned entity. Without one assigned to your page, you cannot access all the functionality required to fully utilise your business page.
Ok so what is best practice?
- After page creation, ensure you have an Admin who is ideally the owner/founder of the business.
- Make sure that any, and all staff only have editor access for their page role. This can be found in Page Settings – Page Roles – Click Edit Roles.
- You could, as an option, allow there to be a pseudo profile to allow you to have the role as a redundant profile associated with the business which isn’t used other than to allow access in case of ‘emergency’.
Does this mean we shouldn’t allow staff roles on our Facebook pages?
No, absolutely do encourage them to do so, should you wish them to take on that role! Just make sure that they have editing access not admin access. Be aware that if you do allow them to have an Admin Role, they have the ability to remove you, remove their colleagues and unpublish or even delete the page. We have seen this happen before, and with a Page with over 5,000 likes, this was as you can imagine, devastating.
Website Access
When we complete a website build, and the final balance is paid, it is our policy to create admin access for our clients, and then to give all of our clients a detailed Handover document. This contains all the information which is rightly the property of the client – your user name, passwords access, font and Pantone references etc etc.
We then give the option for the client to allow us to remain as additional admins. We are always mentioned in our clients privacy policy and then we have the ability to be able to ‘get you back in’ should you lock yourselves out. This is a GDPR compliant procedure and ensures you have the safety net of us. 99% of our clients request this of us and we recommend it as good, safe practice.
As above, it is best practice to not allow anyone who isn’t either a member of management or a trusted, contracted member of staff to have any higher user role than Editor.
Branding
It doesn’t matter what project we are working on with clients; whether that be a website, social media or print and packaging, we always need access to the full branding files. Of course if we have done the branding for the client then it’s great as we already have everything we need!
More often than not though, clients who come to us don’t have all of their branding files. They usually have one, low resolution jpeg that they dig out of an email from yonder years which is not fit for purpose when it comes to pretty much any of the things we need to apply it to.
For production – print, packaging etc, we require vector artwork of any logos and brand assets. For websites we require at least medium resolution jpegs and pngs with transparent backgrounds – this is very important as often the logo is overlaid onto coloured or image backgrounds and no one wants the ugly white box surrounding the logo that jpegs offer.
In an ideal world we would be given colour references, in cmyk or Pantone if applicable for all branding as well as the names of any fonts used. This is in order for us to be able to maintain consistency with any of the materials and media we are producing for the client. This seldom happens though.
We have lost count of the number of times we have had to re-create a logo from scratch using nothing but a low res jpeg. We use our extensive knowledge of fonts to either find the perfect match or one close enough that no-one will notice. We use either hand or digital tracing techniques to turn the full logo into a vector file.
Once we have a lovely, clean, high resolution vector of the logo we can use this to our heart’s ( and the client’s) content!. We can turn it any colour of the rainbow with a click of a button, we can edit copy (handy for strap-lines and sub-brands) and most importantly we can scale it up as big as a bus if we want to without losing any quality. No fuzzy, blurry, pixelated edges here!
So, the advice is, if you are having someone work on a logo for you, please PLEASE make sure that you request the following from them when they hand over all your files:
Logos in jpeg, eps (with outlined fonts!), png and pdf. If you want to be extra safe just ask them to send you the original artwork files too ( often this is .ai).
Along with the logos, ask them to send you the colour references and fonts which belong to your branding.
You might only need one logo for now but you never know what the future holds for your company and what you might need to apply your branding to. It is surprisingly difficult to contact a designer years after they have carried out the work and even if you do, they may not still have all of the original files. ( * note, we store all our clients files indefinitely just in case they misplace them)
E-Commerce and Payment Gateways
More often than not these days the evolution of our customers brand or business involves the implementation or upgrade of an e-commerce shop to effortlessly sell products to customers online.
This is a vital part of how we assist our clients in moving forward. If you already have an e-commerce shop set up then you will know that providing essential log in information is necessary to complete this set up.
It can be daunting to hand over your PayPal, Stripe, Google or other very security heavy log ins to a marketing or web building company… and rightly so! You are handing over access to your businesses finances and that in itself is HUGE!
This is why before we commence any working contract or request this kind of access from you we will send you a Digital Property Statement which is a legal document to ensure your peace of mind in allowing us access to (lets face it) the most precious part of your business or brand.
The most important thing to us at Rockpool Creative is that you are left with not only a beautiful, fully functioning website which does everything you need it to do, but, that you have peace of mind while including us in the intimate details of your business – this is exactly what we continue to strive towards achieving.
So many times we have seen truly unfortunate and unprofessional conduct resulting in a budding companies inability to thrive because they have previously not been afforded the security and peace of mind that they deserve. Companies unfortunately going under for example, leaving no information for how to access etc etc.
With us you can rest assured that your assets – whether they be digital or tangible will be held with the same respect that we hold our own – and we provide you with the documentation to ensure this is so.
The Rockpool Team