Agency holding client site/data hostage. Migration w/o losing equity

[Guest]

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[DennisSeymour]

Is it a big site? If not just start it from scratch while using the same url/content.

If it's a huge site, then that's another problem. You have the find the best pages, check analytics. Identify the most important pages. Prune the rest.

Since there's nothing you can do to get the backup, outside of a lawsuit, then I would just go that route. As for the redesign, you can actually pitch for that to happen ASAP so there's no time wasted. Have the data for the URLs lined up neatly in a spreadsheet with content already save for the important pages.

We don't really know the whole situation, but if it's wordpress or some cms, IF you have backend login, there's a plugin to just backup the whole thing to s3 or anywhere you want. Download it from there and put it up on your server.

[Laurean]

I've ran into this in the past as well... many times.  I wish our industry had better protections for clients because of this very issue.  Maybe somebody at Moz or Mashable can lead that charge (hint-hint!)

Without FTP access, your options are limited.  You will have to recreate the site completely from scratch, but what I've ran into is that the prior agency also held the design as copyright infringement!  Can you believe that?  There are turkeys out there (maybe that's where turnkey comes from).

We were able to make a PDF back up of the entire site, to ensure everything was captured.  Here's how we did it:

(1) Create OUR own sitemap xml using an external service (ie: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/) to ensure ALL pages are gathered.

(2) Dropped the sitemap.xml into Excel, sorted, and cleaned it up so all you are left with are the URLs.

(3) Open up PDF Pro (the paid version, not the free one, runs about $99).      
     File => Create PDF from Web Page   ... or [ctrl]-[shift]-O
     Copy-paste the entire URL from the excel file into the dialog box

Upon the first time of running this, change the settings on the dialog box - [Page Layout]
     Width: 17 in   Height: 30 in  Margins: 0.25in all  (works for most pages)

Once you get on a roll, you can do a couple of pages a minute... it's tedious, I know... but it's a great way to get all the data and layout for every page.... even the images are embedded into the pdf so you can extract them later, copy-paste the text. The first site we did this on had 258 pages, and took my 17 year old daughter about 1.5 hours to do.

The one thing the prior agency did turn over, was a back up of all the blogs the client had actually written.  That seemed fair enough.

It's a great peace of mind and a working tool.

[dianemahan]

Before using all the content from the site, I'd suggest that you run it through a plagiarism checker. Many turnkey sites use the same content in addition to using the same photos in their templates. That could be part of the reason for the poor performance of the existing site. If it's already duplicated content, then you're better off re-writing those pages from scratch.