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 our service agreement, you won’t find any complicated legal terms or long passages of unreadable text.
We'll provide you with the estimated total price of your project. Minor changes or revisions can be added at our hourly rate; larger changes, such as adding a new major feature, will require a separate estimate.
You: You have the authority to enter into our 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 in a timely manner, and you’ll and provide it in the formats we ask for. 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 our contract.
Us: We have the experience and ability to do everything we’ve agreed with you and we’ll do so 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.
We create flexible layouts that adapt to the capabilities of many devices and screen sizes (“responsive design”). We may use visuals to indicate a creative direction (“look and feel”) before a final version is complete.
You’ll have plenty of opportunities to review our work and provide feedback. We’ll share a Dropbox, Google Drive folder, GitHub repository, or staging/development (“preview”) site with you and provide regular updates on your project status.
If, at any stage, you change your mind about what you want to be delivered or are not happy with the direction our work is taking, you’ll pay us in full for the costs incurred on your behalf and time we’ve spent working with you until that point, and then we’ll terminate our contract.
Websites require regular maintenance in order to maintain their security and stability. Unless we have entered into a maintenance agreement, these updates are your responsibility.
If we are hosting your website, we will perform basic maintenance such as:
If you choose to manage website maintenance on your own, you are highly encouraged to perform upgrades on a “staging server” to test for incompatibility before making updates on a live website. You will also be responsible for maintaining the security of your website.
Supplied by us: Our team has a robust asset library with access to free and premium assets that can be used in your project. Unless otherwise discussed, any assets that we use are from these sources and will not incur additional charges within this scope of work.
Supplied by you: You should supply photographs in a high-resolution digital format and graphic files (such as logos or digital illustrations) in an editable, vector digital format.
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 test our work in current versions of major desktop browsers including those made by Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), Microsoft (Edge), and Mozilla Firefox.
We won’t test in other older or deprecated browsers unless we agreed separately, including all versions of Internet Explorer. If you need an enhanced design for an older browser, we can provide a separate estimate.
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 the latest version of these operating systems and apps:
We won’t test in Blackberry, Opera Mini/Mobile, specific Android devices, or other mobile browsers unless we agreed separately. If you need us to test using these, we can provide a separate estimate.
We don’t guarantee improvements to your website’s search engine ranking, but the web pages that we develop are accessible to search engines and we follow modern practices.
If we have registered a domain name on your behalf, the domain is typically licensed for 1 year.
We can transfer the domain registration to the registrar of your choice. Transfers typically incur a charge equal to one year’s domain registration; all transfer charges are your responsibility.
We are also happy to manage renewals of your domain at the current market price for your TLD (top-level domain, such as .com or .org) and will email you a month prior to your domain’s expiry to request payment.
We don’t want to limit your ability to change your mind. The price at the beginning of our contract is based on the amount 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; we can provide a separate estimate for future work or add those features at our hourly rate.
We’ll carry out our work in accordance with good industry practice and at the standard expected from a suitably qualified person with relevant experience. That said, 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.
Your liability to us will also be limited to the amount of fees payable under our contract and you won’t be liable to us or any third-party for damages, including lost profits, lost savings or other incidental, consequential or special damages, even if we’ve advised you of them.
Finally, if any provision of our contract shall be unlawful, void, or for any reason unenforceable, then that provision shall be deemed severable from our contract and shall not affect the validity and enforceability of any remaining provisions.
Just to be clear, “Intellectual property rights” means all patents, rights to inventions, copyright (including rights in software) and related rights, trademarks, service marks, get up and trade names, internet domain names, rights to goodwill or to sue for passing off, rights in designs, database rights, rights in confidential information (including know-how) and any other intellectual property rights, in each case whether registered or unregistered and including all applications (or rights to apply) for, and renewals or extensions of, such rights and all similar or equivalent rights or forms of protection which subsist or shall subsist now or in the future in any part of the world.
First, you guarantee that all elements of text, images or other assets that you provide are either owned by you, or that you have permission to use them. When you provide text, images or other assets to us, you agree to protect us from any claim by a third party that we’re using their intellectual property. Finding an image on Google Images does not mean that you have legal permission to use it in your own project.
We guarantee that all elements of the work we deliver to you are either owned by us or we’ve obtained permission to provide them to you for this specific project. When we provide text, images or other assets to you, we agree to protect you from any claim by a third party that you’re using their intellectual property.
Provided you’ve paid for the work and that our contract hasn’t been terminated, we’ll assign all intellectual property rights to you as follows:
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, social media, web/print articles, books, and other relevant self-promotion pieces. We agree to not use the license you grant us in any way that would hurt you economically.
We like to connect with like-minded companies, and the best way is to make a connection from work we've done with companies such as yours. To help facilitate that, we may place a small, non-obtrusive link to our portfolio on a colophon/credits page of your website or inside your website's footer. Unless stated otherwise, we have your permission to do so.
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.
When we create a quote for your project, we do our best to estimate the costs of expenses. Unless explicitly stated, our quotes do not include reimbursement for expenses including, but not limited to: domain names, hosting costs, fonts, stock photography/video/illustration, licenses, products, or other collateral or materials for our work (“Expenses”).
These Expenses will be billed for separately, and you agree to reimburse us the cost of such expenses after we have provided documentation explaining them. That said, we also aim to avoid surprises; if we anticipate incurring charges beyond our initial quote, we will communicate with you in advance for approval.
We issue invoices electronically. Our payment terms are 30 days from the date of invoice. We accept the following payment methods:
All proposals are quoted in USD unless otherwise noted, and payments will be made at the equivalent conversion rate at the date the payment or transfer is made. You agree to pay all charges associated with international transfers of funds.
We reserve the right to charge interest on all overdue debts at the rate of 1% per month or portion of a month.
We both agree that we’ll adhere to all relevant laws and regulations in relation to our activities under our contract and not cause the other to breach any relevant laws or regulations.
Our contract stays in place and need not be renewed. If for some reason one part of our contract becomes invalid or unenforceable, the remaining parts of it remain in place. This agreement shall be governed, construed, and enforced in accordance with the laws of the State of Illinois, without regard to its conflict of laws rules.
You are working with us as an independent contractor. Nothing contained in our contract creates a partnership, joint venture, or similar business relationship between us. No employee will be considered an employee of the other for any purpose.
Neither party shall be held responsible nor be deemed to be in default under this agreement for any delay or failure in performance if such delay or failure is the result of causes beyond the reasonable control of either party.