I have made a website for a client, who while claiming to be 100%
happy with my work, and even had agreed to the original estimate of
work and had made an  initial deposit, has not paid in full and has
begun lagging/stopping at continuing to make payment for the work that
was done. The work is located on the client's webhost account which I
have access to. Is it legal to temporarily shut down the website until
payment has been remitted in full?

I understand that I could take the client to small claims court or go
through a collection agency, but either possible "solution" is no
guarantee of payment coming due. Meanwhile, the client is getting what
amounts to free advertising.

Both myself and the client live and work in NJ, and the webhost resides in CA.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

There is never any guarantee of getting paid unless you get paid up front.
Go to small claims court or sell the debt.  Unless your contract
specified you have the right to interfere witht the website for
non-payment why put yourself in a postion to be sued?

if you have no contract, anything is game. fight dirty.

Theoretically you still own the work until it's been completely paid
for. If both of you have agreed to this work, both parties have
entered into a contract and it is not fulfilled until final payment
has been made. I create web sites for clients and make sure that they
understand that full copyright is transferred to them when final
payment is made. I am pretty certain that the law sees it this way too
(although I am not a lawyer). If you created it, you essentially own
the copyright to it until the contract is completed. The client should
not gain any benefit from the work until he or she pays in full (or if
you agree otherwise). Thus, you should consider "hiding" the site from
public view until it is done (a good practice anyway). Just rename the
home page to indexnew.html (or something other than the default home
page name) and let the client know the specific address they can go to
until you are ready to make the site live. On the default page, you
can put a "Coming Soon" message to build anticipation for the client
and the eventual release of the site.

Personally, I think small claims court would be a waste of time, but
that would be the best route if you can't get the client to pay up
(and if the amount is substantial enough - there is a max amount for
small claims, maybe around $3k?).  On one or two occassions before,
I've completely blacked out sites and clients have suddenly gotten a
fire underneath them to pay up. This has been most effective in
dealing with clients who are unmotivated to pay, but you run the risk
of them demanding their money back.

The best thing to do in any project is set up a contract in writing
that covers these basic issues. You can also specify a scope for the
design project so you won't run into problems later when the client
"thought" you were going to create additional work that orginally
wasn't specified.

I would just forget him and on the next client have them sign a
contract saying if they dont pay that you will be forced to take them
to court and get all your money including the charges for court.