3plains Alternatives

Most articles about switching vendors compare the vendors. That is the wrong end of the problem when the incumbent is a full-service shop, because the hard part is not choosing where to go, it is working out what actually comes with you. A guide site built and hosted by one supplier can involve seven separate assets, and they have seven different answers to the question of whether they move. Do that inventory before you shortlist anybody and the decision changes shape entirely: some of you will discover the switch is trivial, and some will discover the site is the smallest part of it. Driftline is one of the places you might move to, so weigh everything here accordingly.

Why is the inventory the whole decision?

Because the cost of leaving is not the new supplier's fee, it is the sum of everything you have to reconstruct. Two guides with identical sites can face completely different switching costs depending on who holds what.

The guide who registered their own domain, keeps their photographs on their own drive, and has the logo as a vector file is in a strong position. Moving is an inconvenience.

The guide whose domain sits in the agency's account, whose only copies of the photographs are the compressed versions on the live site, and whose logo exists as a single JPEG from 2019, is facing a project. Neither guide knows which one they are until they check.

So check first. An hour with a checklist tells you whether this is a decision or a negotiation, and it is worth doing even if you have no intention of leaving, which is the same argument made across the ownership piece.

Green River Fishing Guides at Dutch John Resort, UT

What is the specific thing to understand about the incumbent?

Which platform your site is on, because a full-service outdoor shop may have built you either a standard content management system or its own. Those two have completely different exit properties and the difference is not visible from the front end.

3plains describes its own content management system as software as a service, managed remotely through its portal, and separately offers managed WordPress as a different service. So the platform is a choice made at the point of sale, and if you do not remember which one you got, you do not currently know what leaving involves.

Find out first, before anything else in this article. Ask directly, and ask what you would receive and in what format if you gave notice.

Whether content in that proprietary system can be exported is not stated on the public pages, and I am not going to guess at it. It has a one-sentence answer if you ask, and it is the single most consequential sentence in the whole conversation.

What does the ongoing arrangement tell you?

A lot, and it is worth rereading before you decide anything. The same service plans page states that work outside the plan gets billed at current rates, invoiced in one-hour increments, with a note that prices may fluctuate.

Read that as information rather than as a complaint. An hourly-changes model is common and honest, and it makes your real annual cost dependent on how often you ask for things.

Which gives you a number worth calculating before shopping. Add up what you actually paid last year including every change request, not the headline plan price. That total is what an alternative has to beat.

Guides routinely find that number is either much lower than they assumed, in which case switching is hard to justify, or much higher, in which case they have found their reason. Either way you now have a figure instead of an impression.

What actually happens to the domain?

It moves, but the order of operations decides whether that takes a week or two months. If the domain is registered in the agency's name, request the transfer to your own registrar first and change the registrant details second.

Under the governing policy, a registrar is permitted to freeze a name for two months once ownership details change. The policy text itself instructs registrars to warn the outgoing holder to move the name between registrars first, for exactly that reason.

Reverse those two steps and nothing improper has happened, but the name is stuck for eight weeks. No warning appears on the screen at the moment you click, which is the entire reason this paragraph is here.

Start the domain work before you sign with anybody new, because a new supplier waiting on a locked domain is a supplier billing you while nothing happens.

What about the email?

This is the part that goes wrong, and it goes wrong quietly. If your mailbox is hosted by the same shop, moving the domain without planning the email means messages stop arriving and you find out from a client.

The sequence that works is: set up the new mailbox first, get mail flowing to both, then move the records, then decommission the old one. Never the reverse.

Export the archive before anything else. Years of client correspondence, deposit confirmations and reschedules live in that mailbox, and it is the one asset that genuinely cannot be reconstructed.

Give this its own week rather than treating it as a step in the website move. It is a separate project that happens to share a domain, and why it matters at all is set out in the business email piece.

Do the photographs come with you?

Only if you hold originals. The versions on your live site have been compressed for the web and are not a usable archive, so if the shop took the photographs, the full-resolution files are theirs unless your agreement says otherwise.

This catches people out because the images are visibly right there on the site. Downloading them gives you small, sharpened, already-processed files that will look poor if anybody ever prints them or crops them.

Ask for the originals now, whether or not you are leaving. It is a reasonable request during a good relationship and an awkward one during a bad one.

The same applies to any video. If somebody shot a day on the water for you, the footage is a bigger and more valuable asset than the edited clip on your homepage.

What about the logo and print work?

Ask for the source files, and know the difference between a source file and an export. A vector file can be resized to a boat wrap; a JPEG cannot.

This matters for a full-service shop specifically, because that is exactly the sort of supplier who also made your logo, your business cards and your rack cards. All of those exist as working files somewhere, and what you have is likely only the outputs.

The request is simple: the editable originals for anything they designed. Do it as housekeeping rather than as a prelude to leaving, and do it in the offseason when nobody is busy.

If the answer is no, or if the files are gone, that is a real cost to factor into any move, because a logo recreated from a JPEG is a redraw rather than a copy.

What happens to your search rankings?

Partly preserved, partly at risk, and the deciding factor is whether the new build keeps the same page addresses or redirects every old one to its replacement. That is a technical requirement to write into a new agreement, not something to hope for.

The failure looks like this: the new site launches, every page has a new address, and every link anybody ever made to the old ones now leads nowhere. Traffic falls, and it falls a few weeks later, so the cause is not obvious.

Ask any prospective supplier one question about this: how will you handle the old URLs. A competent answer includes the word redirect and an offer to map every existing page. A vague answer is a warning.

Take a full list of your current page addresses before anything changes, because after the switch nobody can reconstruct what used to exist. Export it from your analytics or your sitemap and keep the file. How to read what happens afterwards is in the diagnostic piece.

So what are the actual alternatives?

Three shapes, and the inventory above usually decides which one fits. Another full-service shop, an unbundled set of specialists, or bringing most of it in-house on a mainstream platform.

Another full-service shop is the lowest-effort move and keeps the convenience you presumably valued. The narrower outdoor and fishing shops sit here, and the way to read what each is built around is set out in the agencies piece. One useful reference point when comparing: at least one outdoor-industry shop publishes its monthly rates, starting at $1,000, which gives you something concrete to hold your current annual total against.

Unbundling means separating the site, the hosting, the email and the marketing so no single relationship holds all of it. More administration, much cheaper exits next time, and it is what most guides end up doing after being stuck once.

Doing it yourself on a mainstream platform is more viable than it used to be and is the honest answer for a lot of one-boat operations, particularly those whose real complaint is paying hourly for changes they could make themselves in a minute.

Dupree, AR

When should you not switch?

When the complaint is about a thing nobody is doing rather than a thing being done badly. A great many switches solve nothing because the new supplier inherits the same unfilled brief.

Ask yourself what specifically has gone wrong. Slow responses, work you did not authorize, invoices you cannot explain, a site that has not changed in three years. Those are real. "It feels stale" usually is not, on its own.

Also check whether you have ever asked. A surprising share of frustration in these relationships is with things the client assumed were included and never requested, and one direct conversation resolves it more cheaply than any migration.

Switching costs a season of momentum even when it goes well. Make sure the thing you are buying is different rather than merely new, which is the pattern examined in the agency exits piece.

How long does a move actually take?

Plan for a season rather than a month, and plan the overlap deliberately. The build is the short part; the sequencing around it is what stretches.

Work backwards from the date you want the new site live and you will find the constraints stack. The domain work needs to start first because of the lock. The email needs its own window. The content needs writing, and the person who has to write most of it is you.

Budget for running both suppliers at once for a period. That feels wasteful and it is the cheapest insurance available, because the alternative is a gap where the old site is off and the new one is not ready.

Start the whole thing the week the season ends. Anything begun in spring collides with the months where you cannot answer email, which is the argument made at length in the offseason piece.

What should the new agreement contain that the old one probably did not?

Four clauses, all short, all refused by nobody reasonable. Ownership, exit format, redirects, and access.

Ownership means the domain, the accounts and the content are registered to you with the supplier granted access, rather than the other way round. That single arrangement prevents most of what this article is about.

Exit format means a stated answer to what you receive if the relationship ends, in what file formats, within how many days. Ask for it as a sentence in the agreement rather than as a verbal reassurance.

Redirects and access are the practical two. Every old page mapped to a new one at launch, and administrative access to your own analytics, advertising and profile accounts from day one. None of these four is unusual, and a supplier who resists all four has told you something worth knowing before you pay anybody.

What do experienced guides do differently?

They do the inventory while everything is fine. And they never let one supplier hold the domain, the email and the site at the same time.

Doing the audit during a good relationship is the whole trick, because every request in it is reasonable in that context. Send me the original photographs. Confirm the domain is in my account. Send me the logo source files. Nobody objects, and afterwards you are never trapped again.

The separation habit is the structural version of the same insight. Domain at a registrar you control, email at a provider you pay directly, site with whoever builds it. One relationship ending then breaks one thing.

Experienced operators also keep a plain file listing where everything lives and who has access. Two pages, refreshed each winter next to everything else in the offseason list.

What are the common mistakes?

Signing with the new supplier before starting the domain transfer. Moving the domain without planning the email. Launching without redirects. And never asking for the source files.

The signing-first mistake is the most expensive because it converts a delay into a bill. A locked domain stops everything, and the two-month clock does not care that you are paying somebody to wait.

The email mistake is the one clients notice. A website being down for a day is embarrassing; inquiries silently failing to arrive for a week during your season is money.

The redirect mistake is the one nobody notices for a month, and by then the cause is buried under a launch. Write it into the agreement before work starts, and ask for the URL map as a deliverable rather than a promise.

What surprises people?

That the website is often the least important thing in the move. That the photographs on your own site are not usable originals. And that the order of two administrative steps can cost two months.

The photograph realization lands hardest, because guides reasonably assume that images of their own clients on their own site are theirs to take. What is on the page is a processed copy, and processing is not reversible.

The broader surprise is how much of this has nothing to do with whoever you are unhappy with. Most of the friction in leaving comes from arrangements made years earlier for convenience, by people who were not thinking about exits, which is nobody's fault and entirely preventable. Where to go next is the whole subject of the marketing help hub.