Your website — what it's for, and how to own it

A website in a referral trade isn't a billboard. This manual is about what it's actually for: whether you even need one yet, what it should honestly cost, how to test your own the way a customer does, and — the part that burns people — how to find out which pieces you actually own. If a vendor is already sitting on your domain, naming that doesn't hand it back the same day; getting it back is a separate job with its own clock. But nobody wins a fight over something they can't name.

Three questions to start with. Take whichever one is yours. Seventeen chapters are mapped for this manual; these three are built and checked so far.

• Do you actually need a website?

  The honest no — and the free listing to use instead. Start here if you're not even sure this is worth money yet.

• Test your own site like a customer

  Twenty minutes on your own phone — forty if you run the speed test. Finding and fixing are two different jobs, and some of the fixes need a login you may not hold yet. Do the walk, write down every no, and take that list to whoever runs your screens. Start here if you have a site and don't know if it's doing anything.

• What you own online, and what it's worth when you sell

  The five things your presence is made of, and who holds each. Start here if someone else built your stuff and you're not sure what's actually yours. Already know a vendor is holding a piece? The recovery walk is when your web guy vanishes.