Transferring domain name over to Squarespace

[Robin88]

I've been asked by my girlfriends dad to set up a new website for him, but it gets a bit complicated because the current setup is being looked after by a third party, and I could do with a bit of advice on how best to move everything along with minimal disruption and minimal difficulty.

He has a website already, which is here, and to be frank it is fucking awful, a total embarrassment to my girlfriends dad and is actually harming his ability to attract work, most people who see that website will think he is a joke and neither myself or he can blame them.

What we want to do is to transfer the domain over to SquareSpace and take it over from the third party.

I have a rough idea of what we need to do, but I need some more experienced eyes to look over the plan and tell me if its possible for one, and also if the plan is a good one.

The idea is to talk to the third party, who is a friend of my girlfriends dad, and ask who is the current hosting service and registrar of the domain and get him to transfer the domain over to our control and remove the third party from the picture.

We will then see if we can transfer the domain over to SquareSpace and set up a 2 week trial for the new website using the current domain.

Let my girlfriends dad look at the new website and see if he is happy with it, if he is, then go ahead with paying for a full 1 year subscription to SquareSpace, my girlfriends dad will be given full control of the website and any changes to it will be run by him before anything else is done, the website will be registered to him and only him so that should anything happen between us he will still have ultimate control over the website and the current situation he is in will not be able to happen again, and he can ask someone else to help him maintain the website.

I can see several problems already with this plan.

I did some quick research, and I saw something about domains not being transferrable to SquareSpace as they don't have a hosting service for domains (is that correct?) and if that is the case then it will be a huge problem for us as we would really like to keep the current domain and use it with SquareSpace.

We are completely in the dark about how the current website is setup, we don't know how the third party will react to the plan, and he may decide to just lock us out of everything, and because he currently owns the domain he could make everything difficult, if not downright impossible.

To be fair the third party is a fairly close friend and may very well be quite amicable about the whole thing, but my intuition is telling me he will make everything as difficult as possible.

so what I want to know is this, is it possible to transfer an existing domain to SquareSpace, and is the order of doing everything a good idea or are there unforseen issues with the plan and making a whole new domain a better idea?

I know it's a long post, but if you could take the time to read it and let me know if there is a better way of doing things it would be much appreciated.

[Robin88]

Thank you for the response, I hope it is as easy as you say, I would have preferred to have everything in one place, but if it works as you say then it's a decent enough compromise for what we need.

I just hope that the friend doesn't make things difficult for us, as our lasses dad gets a lot of work through the website, and unfortunately one aspect that will throw a spanner in the works is the fact that not only is the website controlled by his friend, but his primary email address is tied to the website and is under his control, so if one goes down then the other will go with it.

Even worse is that the email address password is unknown to both myself and to our lasses dad, so we can receive emails, but we cannot reply to them through his primary email, and the friend may also have exclusive access to every single one of his emails, meaning that his friend could very well be deleting emails before we see them and can quite easily remove his main form of contact with new customers.

The current setup is completely fucked up, and I apologise for swearing, but the whole situation is infuriating me at how his so-called friends have backed him into a corner and the only way out may be to just start over from scratch.

I've already made him a gmail account so that we can start diverting all his emails to it and completely away from his friends control, but getting the emails to go only to the new address is going to be quite a big job, as we have potentially thousands of contacts to inform of the new address and many more hundreds of new contacts to inform as they come in, but that's a seperate issue and one that I have a more clear idea on how to deal with, but it gives you an idea of the scope of the issue we're facing.

What makes it worse as well is that as all this is going on, our lasses dad wants to learn how to use a computer, needs time to get his work done, make sure that he stays informed as to the situation regarding the website, and find time to maintain a healthy lifestyle.