Website Development Terms And Conditions
Summary
We’ll always do our best to fulfil your needs and meet your expectations, but it’s important to have things written down so that we both know what’s what, who should do what and when, and what will happen if something goes wrong. In this contract you won’t find any complicated legal terms or long passages of unreadable text. We’ve no desire to trick you into signing something that you might later regret. What we do want is what’s best for both parties, now and in the future.
So in short;
You are hiring us (Crush My Market) to design and develop a web site for the estimated total price specified on the "Pricing" page of this proposal. Of course it’s a little more complicated, but we’ll get to that.
What Both Parties Agree To Do
You: have the authority to enter into this contract on behalf of yourself, your company or your organisation. You’ll give us the assets and information we tell you we need to complete the project. You’ll do this when we ask and provide it in the formats we need. You’ll review our work, provide feedback and approval in a timely manner too. Deadlines work two ways, so you’ll also be bound by dates we set together. You also agree to stick to the payment schedule set out at the end of this contract.
Crush My Market: We have the experience and ability to do everything we’ve agreed with you and we’ll do it all in a professional and timely manner. We’ll endeavour to meet every deadline that’s set and on top of that we'll maintain the confidentiality of everything you give us.
Design
We create look-and-feel designs, and flexible layouts that adapt to the capabilities of many devices and screen sizes. We create designs iteratively and use predominantly HTML and CSS so we won’t waste time mocking up every template as a static visual. We may use visuals to indicate a creative direction (color, texture and typography.) We call that ‘atmosphere.’
You’ll have plenty of opportunities to review our work and provide feedback. We’ll create an account for you on our project management tool and we’ll provide regular, possibly daily contact.
Written Content
Unless agreed to separately, we’re not responsible for copywriting or creating written content for your website. We provide professional copywriting and editing services, so if you’d like us to create new content or input for you, we can provide a separate estimate for that.
Graphics And Photographs
You should supply graphic files in an editable, vector digital format. You should supply photographs in a high resolution digital format. If you choose to buy stock photographs, we can suggest stock libraries. If you’d like us to search for photographs for you (beyond what we've agreed to based upon your website development plan), we can provide a separate estimate for that.
WordPress
We use WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) for all of our websites. It's simple to use and we can create highly functional and beautiful websites. We'll teach you what you need to know after the site has been launched so you can perform updates, add blog posts, change content, etc. Of course, we are happy to do those things for you if you elect our Hosting and Maintenance package.
Browser Testing
Browser testing no longer means attempting to make a website look the same in browsers of different capabilities or on devices with different size screens. It does mean ensuring that a person’s experience of a design should be appropriate to the capabilities of a browser or device.
Desktop Browsers
We test our work in current versions of major desktop browsers including those made by Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), Microsoft (Edge), Mozilla Firefox and Opera. We’ll also test to ensure that people who use Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 for Windows get an appropriate experience. We won’t test in other older browsers unless we agreed separately. If you need an enhanced design for an older browser, we can provide a separate estimate for that.
Mobile Browsers
Testing using popular smaller screen devices is essential in ensuring that a person’s experience of a design is appropriate to the capabilities of the device they’re using. We test our designs in:
iOS 9: Safari, Google Chrome
Android: Google Chrome on Android Emulator
We won’t test in Blackberry, Opera Mini/Mobile, specific Android devices, Windows or other mobile browsers unless we agreed separately. If you need us to test using these, we can provide a separate estimate for that.
Technical Support
We offer a separate Hosting and Maintenance package for an additional (reasonable) monthly fee. If you elect that option, we'll provide ongoing support including keeping your website up-to-date, making sure security best practices are being implemented, making any changes that require less than 30 minutes of time, backing up the site on a daily basis, and hosting on a really fast server. If you don't select this option, then once the site has been live for a week and there are no issues our support ends and you'd have to engage us separately if you need anything else. Of course, if there's an issue relating to what we did, we will always fix those for no additional fee.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
We don’t guarantee improvements to your website’s search engine ranking, but the web pages that we develop are accessible to search engines. We're a full blown inbound marketing agency and providing SEO is one of the things we do. We're happy to provide those services to you if you'd like (of course, for an additional fee).
Changes And Revisions
We know from experience that fixed-price contracts are rarely beneficial to you, as they often limit you to your earliest ideas. We don’t want to limit your ability to change your mind. The price at the beginning of this contract is based on the number of weeks that we estimate we’ll need to accomplish everything you’ve told us you want to achieve, but we’re happy to be flexible. If you want to change your mind or add anything new, that won’t be a problem as we’ll provide a separate estimate for those additional weeks.
Legal Stuff
We can’t guarantee that our work will be error-free and so we can’t be liable to you or any third-party for damages, including lost profits, lost savings or other incidental, consequential or special damages, even if you’ve advised us of them. Finally, if any provision of this contract shall be unlawful, void, or for any reason unenforceable, then that provision shall be deemed severable from this contract and shall not affect the validity and enforceability of any remaining provisions.
Copyrights
First, you guarantee that all elements of text, images or other artwork you provide are either owned by your good selves, or that you have permission to use them.
Then, when your final payment has cleared, copyright will be automatically assigned as follows:
You’ll own the visual elements that we create for this project. We’ll give you source files and finished files and you should keep them somewhere safe as we’re not required to keep a copy. You own all elements of text, images and data you provided, unless someone else owns them.
We’ll own the unique combination of these elements that constitutes a complete design and we’ll license its use to you, exclusively and in perpetuity for this project only, unless we agree otherwise.
Displaying Our Work
We love to show off our work, so we reserve the right to display all aspects of our creative work, including sketches, work-in-progress designs and the completed project on our portfolio and in articles on websites, in magazine articles and in books. We typically include a link in the footer of the home page of your website so that when someone sees your site and they love it, they know who to contact to get an equally awesome site. You're free to remove that link if you'd like, or we'll do it for you upon request.
Payment Schedule
We’re sure you understand how important it is as a small business that you pay the invoices that we send you promptly. As we’re also sure you’ll want to stay friends, you agree to stick tight to the following payment schedule.
Any projects totalling $3,000 or less are due in full at the beginning of the project. We won't start working on your project until we receive payment.
Any projects totalling more than $3,000 require a 50% deposit at the beginning of the project. The final 50% is due on the earlier of 1) the day the site is launched live or 2) the date we said the site would be going live in this proposal unless there was a delay on our part. What this means is if we get delayed because you aren't meeting your deadlines, we still get paid on time.
We issue invoices electronically. Payment can be made via an electronic bank transfer, credit card (for an additional 1.5% processing fee since that's what we get charged by our processing company), or check. Payment is due within 10 days of the invoice being issued.
We reserve the right to charge interest on all overdue debts at the rate of 10% per month or part of a month.
The Small Print
Just like a parking ticket, you can’t transfer this contract to anyone else without our permission. This contract stays in place and need not be renewed. If for some reason one part of this contract becomes invalid or unenforceable, the remaining parts of it remain in place.
Although the language is simple, the intentions are serious and this contract is a legal document under exclusive jurisdiction of the State of California.