Terms of Business

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 THE CLIENT, are hiring us BRITWEB LTD located at Suite 2, First Floor, 7-8 Sterling Buildings, Carfax, Horsham, West Sussex, RH12 1DR to design and develop a website for the estimated total price as outlined in any previous correspondence or undertake a period of digital marketing in a retained capacity as part of a contracted term. Of course it’s a little more complicated, but we’ll get to that.

What do both parties agree to do?

You: You have the authority to enter into this contract on behalf of yourself, your company or your organisation. You’ll give us everything we need to complete the project including necessary access to platforms as and when and in the format we need it. 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.

Us: 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.

Getting down to the nitty gritty

Design

We create look-and-feel designs, and flexible layouts that adapt to the capabilities of many devices and screen sizes in your desired format. 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 static visuals to indicate a look-and-feel direction (colour, texture and typography.) We call that ‘overall design.’

We will provide up to 3 versions of the overall design artwork within the estimated price, the amount of iterations you will receive will be outlined in your quote. If you require more revisions we’ll provide a separate estimate for that.

If, at any stage, you’re not happy with the direction our work is taking, you’ll pay us in full for everything we’ve produced until that point and cancel this contract.

Content Writing

We will input text copy if it is provided to us in an editable digital format according to the limits described in the estimate we have provided to you. It is your responsibility to check spelling, grammar and accuracy on any copy supplied. If you want us to write text copy for you this will also be detailed in your estimate.

If we are writing copy for you, we will provide up to 3 revisions of that text within the estimated price. For edits beyond that we will provide a separate estimate.

Media, Fonts and Images

You must 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, we can provide a separate estimate for that.

If you want us to purchase stock photography on your behalf, that’s fine, but all costs will be passed on to you.

Logo, icons and other similar artwork must be supplied in a vector format suitable for printing at any resolution.

If you have specific requirements for third party fonts, they must be supplied and licensed appropriately based on an independent agreement with the copyright holder.

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.

We aim to support more than 97% of all global web users on all platforms.

As such we routinely test on:

  • Google Chrome (desktop & mobile)
  • Apple Safari (on desktop and mobile)
  • Firefox
  • Microsoft Edge

We will not routinely test sites on browsers which are :

  • outdated or longer maintained (e.g. Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge (Legacy))
  • specific to certain devices or manufacturers (e.g. Samsung Internet, Blackberry QNX, Symbian)
  • only have a very small observable user base (e.g. Opera, UC Browser)

If you require us to support a specific browser or platform that is not covered by our routine testing, we can provide a separate estimate for that.

Technical support & training

We want to make sure you are not flying blind with your new website so we will offer basic training on the platform that we use to build your site, and will make sure you know how to use the parts of it you want to control. If you require extensive training, or want us to train a lot of people, we’ll provide a separate estimate for that.

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 length of time 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 that.

If you want to make changes further down the line that aren’t possible with the tools we’ve provided to you, we’ll provide a separate estimate for that.

Third-Party Plugins

With most sites, we will make use of third-party plugins, often these are commercial works. If payment is required, we will purchase on your behalf and add any recurring payments required to your bill at cost. Most of the time, these work great, but often we will not be able to test them completely until after purchase. On the rare occasion that something doesn’t work as expected we may be unable to offer a refund for costs incurred or time spent.

For this reason, we strongly encourage the use of open source plugins where possible since they are more transparent and highlight potential issues before making costly commitments.

Performance & Page Speed

Since performance of your site can have an impact on your visitors experience and in turn on SEO we take this into account as part of your site build and support agreement. Conditions vary wildly so we can’t make any promises, but we do check against various metrics (including Google PageSpeed Insights) and try to keep it reasonably quick within your normal support agreement.

If anything less than ‘blisteringly fast’ is not acceptable then we’ll need to provide a separate estimate for the optimisation work and may need to make adjustments which will affect your hosting costs.

Copyrights

You guarantee that all elements of text, images, fonts, videos, audio files or other artwork you provide are either owned by you, or that you have permission to use them. You may be required to provide evidence of license agreements on request at any time. If additional costs or damages are incurred due to incorrectly licensed assets you have supplied, they will be passed on to you.

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 that to you, exclusively and in perpetuity for this project only, unless we agree otherwise. We can provide a separate estimate for that.

… wait… what was that?

Yes, it sounds a little odd that you don’t actually own the website, but if we were to sign over copyright for all the code and data that comprises the site, you could sue us for building a website for anyone else as we’d likely be using a lot of the same stuff. Many other contributions are also used when developing a website, and we’re bound by their licensing agreements in the same way and can’t sign their work over to you. Don’t worry though, you can do whatever you want to with the website and have every right to take it elsewhere once you’ve paid for it, whatever the reason.

We love to show off our work and share what we’ve learned with other people, so we reserve the right, with your permission, to display and link to your project as part of our portfolio and to write about it on websites, in magazine articles and in books.

Payments

We’re sure you understand how important it is as a 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.

Invoices are marked up individually with their payment terms. The amounts and terms on an invoice are generally not up for discussion (except to correct obvious errors), when we send an invoice, we expect it to be paid in full on or before the due date, and have likely already spent that money on printer ink, salaries, and tea.

Unless otherwise arranged, our payment schedule works as follows:

Before we start work:

We need a deposit payment in advance for 50% of the price we have estimated for the whole project, or if a retainer client, your first months billable, this will always be paid in advance. That will allow us to schedule the time for our guys to do the work. This deposit, or retainer fee is non-refundable under any circumstances.

When the site is ready for testing

At the point where we make the site available to you to review and test, we will invoice for a further 25% of the project estimate.
48 Hours before we put your site live

We require cleared payment in full for the remaining 25% of the project estimate plus any additional chargeable work or expenses that we have quoted during the development process. This is particularly true if the site is to be hosted with another provider.

Website Hosting & Ongoing Services

We are not a web hosting company, we don’t own huge data centres and have fancy biometric door locks. We leave that down to other providers who have proven reliable and cost effective.

Basic website support and maintenance is covered in a monthly payment from £60 (+ VAT) payable on the first of the month and covering the proceeding month. We provide hosting for you and it makes sense for us to include that in those monthly payments where it’s needed, as keeping things together reduces our costs.

If you wish to manage hosting yourself with your own preferred provider, all that we ask is that the support contract is continued as a retainer for us to jump in if you need us to. If support time exceeds 2 hours in any given month, we reserve the right to charge extra based on a separate estimate at our discretion. We will therefore be given administrative access to your hosting account to enable us to make changes urgently, and must be notified of changes of access credentials.

What’s included in the support agreement

We agree to jump in and fix your site or carry out maintenance as soon as we are aware of a problem via our exclusive client support system. The support contract covers the installation of security patches where required, plugin updates and server maintenance. To be effective in this support, we must be allowed to change or temporarily restrict access to any portion of the website for a wide range of reasons. We will endeavour to give notice of any access restrictions or expected downtime where possible.

What if I want to end our monthly contract

You need to ask in writing for the support or service contract to be ended allowing 30 days notice. Don’t just lock us out of your hosting account without telling us or we’ll continue to bill you.

Termination of the support contract also implies termination of your hosting contract if you are hosting with us, so before the contract ends, you will need to arrange alternative hosting, but we’re happy to provide everything you need to move smoothly.

Unlimited hosting from £60 a month? That sounds too good to be true!

Yes, unfortunately it is. It’s quite possible if your site experiences a lot of traffic (good or bad) that the hosting costs will spiral. As such we reserve the right to terminate your free hosting at any point. We will provide 14 days notice before terminating the free hosting we provide and promise to work with you to find a suitable and cost effective alternative.

Since we effectively provide hosting only as a convenience to you and ourselves, not as a part of our core business model, we accept no liability for downtime, nasty hackers, loss of income or loss of data. The same goes for any email accounts you might host with us. We’re pretty good at keeping on top of it, including regular backups, updates and service monitoring. Long and short of it is if that clause worries you, then alternative hosting is probably the way you want to go.

If you are a retained digital marketing client

We have a very strong digital marketing department (DM) within britweb encompassing SEO, outreach, content strategies, social media and data insights. DM work will be based on an agreed number of hours each month.

We don’t guarantee improvements to your website’s search engine ranking, but the pages that we develop are accessible to search engines and we utilise best practice techniques. Our minimum number of hours per month for SEO is 10. This is the base number of hours that we have found we need in order to effect positive and sustainable change to organic rankings.

We recognise that things can change from time to time and we will always welcome working in a dynamic way. We therefore plan work from week to week and need at least 3 working days notice in order to book more time into a given week. We will inform you when your agreed hours for the month have been completed and any additional hours agreed upon thereafter will be added to a separate invoice at the end of the month that the work took place.

We will produce a monthly report which highlights your website and marketing performance. We report on all of the core information such as site visits, conversions and goals. If you require a more detailed report, we are happy to provide this at an additional cost.

We will also ask for a regular review meeting with all key stakeholders to ensure that we are delivering on expectations. We are happy to schedule calls, Skype calls and other forms of contact, the time for which will be taken from agreed hours.

From time to time britweb will also put expectations on the client which may delay progress if not addressed in a timely manner. We will always ensure that we give you an adequate lead time to grant us accessibility so that a program of work can be fulfilled in an effective manner, on time and within scope.

Please note that we will endeavour to complete all work in a timely manner, and have a scheduled amount of work to do each month. We will require sign off to completed work before it is placed live.

But where’s all the horrible small print?

Although of course we will endeavour to satisfy your requirements at every stage of the project, 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, lost data or other incidental, consequential or special damages, even if you’ve advised us of them.

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 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.

Although the language is simple, the intentions are serious and this contract is a legal document under exclusive jurisdiction of English and Welsh courts.