Website redesign with new designers

[bakeja]

Hi, this is going to seem a very basic question. I had my website designed and built by a webdesign company about a year ago. Now I want to make biggish changes but the original designer is not being very responsive and I would like to employ someone else. My fear is that the designer owns the code or at least could prevent me getting anyone else in by not giving access to it. Am I right?

The site has a CMS in Joomla. If I gave access to a Joomla expert could they probably do most of the changes I have in mind? Putting in new pages, taking some out, changing layouts. Nothing too dramatic but much more than I can do with my current abilities on the CMS.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

[craftygeek]

Joomla is a free piece of software produced by an open community - I don't see how anyone could have a problem with a design template being tweaked, or redesigned....its your website.

Adding new content has no effect to what your previous designer has done.

If it was a CMS that the previous designer had built from scratch, then I might be of a slightly different opinion.

 

[JamieM]

i don't see the problem either, joomla is free. as far as adding/removing pages, that is the whole point to a cms like that, login and do it, it's your site and nobody can tell you what you can and cannot do with your own content.

as far as changing the site "look" if you purchased or somebody else designed a new template, it can be just uploaded, again this is a feature of joomla, and nobody can stop you.

if i was you i would get the hosting and domain details and move your site away from him.

he can not own your joomla site.

JM

 

[jemountfort]

get a login for the site, e.g. www.xxxx.com/cpanel, back up all the data both the public_html folder and export the database, before starting poking around, proivded you have the data that was hosted, any web designer will be able to help you.

I have had similar problems, and i would recommend getting a copy of the site, just incase, before switching web designers

 

[bakeja]

Thanks to all of you for some really useful replies. I am pretty sure a lot of what I want to do can be done just using the Joomla CMS but it was a bespoke design and some things maybe not. Very useful details about backing up and taking full control - that's what I really need.

The original designers have gone silent on me despite offering a reasonable sum for the work I need doing. Are they so busy that they can't bother to reply to repeated offers of work? Good business this web design if that's the case!

Thanks once again for taking a few minutes to help me.