You: For any agreements made, you have the authority to enter into a given contract on behalf of yourself, your company or your organisation. You’ll provide the assets and information we need to provide support or further develop your website in a timely manner. You’ll review our work, provide feedback and provide approval in a timely manner too.
Us: We have the experience and ability to deliver everything we agree with you, we’ll do so in a professional and timely manner and we’ll maintain the confidentiality of the materials you provide to us.
1. HOSTING AND SUPPORT (where applicable)
1.1. We’ll provide hosting and support exclusively for the website detailed, but we may offer help with other websites and services at our discretion.
1.2. During this agreement’s term we will be the exclusive provider of web support, design and development services for your website. You agree not to engage any other organisation or individuals to provide such services, or use a login to your website, as doing so may compromise our ability to provide support.
1.3. We provide hosting via third parties (currently Siteground). We can’t guarantee uninterrupted services but regularly review our hosting choices to ensure a good balance between uptime, performance and support for the budget you have. The sites we host are bound by their terms and conditions, available at https://www.siteground.co.uk/terms.htm. Hosting terms and conditions may change if we need to seek new hosting.
1.4. All hosting support issues will be managed by us with third party hosting providers.
1.5. We’ll work to fix problems that arise from server errors, software errors, or hacking as quickly as possible. However, we can’t take responsibility for third-party hosting or software failures affecting your website and a fix may involve the need to find new plugins and services, write new software or take alternative approaches according to time and budget.
1.6. A backup of your website is taken on a daily basis. This limits the amount of data loss that can be caused by the rare event of catastrophic failure or hack to about a day of activity (depending on the amount of time a backup takes to run). We can’t take responsibility for any loss of data caused by such failures and encourage you to save all emails for e.g. purchases from the website so that data can be added where necessary or offline methods of processing pursued if necessary, following such an incident.
1.7. Routine plugin and theme updates will need to be made to your site alongside tweaks to hosting to improve areas like caching, performance data optimisation and the time taken to do this work is considered within the contracted monthly hours of this agreement.
1.8. Emergency support is provided during working hours between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday and for site downtime issues, we ask that you both email and call, highlighting the emergency status, for a fast response. For emergency issues, we agree that our first response time is within an hour during working hours. We can’t guarantee out of hours support but we will provide you with a phone number to call for emergency issues and will work, when possible, to help mitigate emergency issues as they arise.
1.9. Force Majeure: Neither party shall be liable for any delay or failure to perform its obligations under this agreement if such delay or failure is caused by any event beyond the reasonable control of the affected party, including but not limited to acts of God, war, terrorism, natural disasters, widespread power outages, major internet disruptions, or government restrictions. The affected party shall promptly notify the other party of the force majeure event and the expected impact on performance. The affected party shall use its reasonable best efforts to mitigate the impact of the force majeure event on its performance, and the parties shall work together in good faith to develop a plan to resume performance as soon as practicable.
2. GRAPHICS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
2.1. If your design requires stock images, these assets and the time we spend selecting them aren’t included in our price. We can provide a separate estimate for stock images and research.
3. CONTACTS AND CHANGE CONTROL
3.1. You’ll provide a suitable single point of contact who is able to own tasks internally from a project or product management perspective, field issues and prioritise requests from across your organisation. Where a small team rather than an individual is responsible for administering your website, we’re happy to deal with any member of that team.
3.2. You agree that an appropriate change control approach will be maintained to include clear prioritisation of agreed tasks including the gathering of suitable stakeholder information along with developer feedback from The Web Foundry to ensure a request is achievable and possible within the hours and budget available.
3.2. We agree to also provide a single point of contact with the knowledge and skills to provide sound consultancy, which may change for temporary periods for holiday cover or sickness.
3.3. Where a website relies on third party components such as themes and plugins, not everything you might want to do is possible within the scope of the plugins we are using or ones that are available. We’ll therefore need you to provide requirements rather than specific solutions or approaches and rely on us to devise an appropriate solution that works best for the software available to us and using best practice in terms of usability and software design. We agree to provide the expertise needed to meet requirements with the knowledge and experience we have to deliver work according to industry standards.
4. WORK AND SCHEDULING
4.1. You agree that the timing of non-urgent work and meetings will be by agreement. We have other clients and demands but we agree to always be amenable within the scope of the contracted hours available.
5. TESTING
5.1. You understand that 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 means ensuring someone’s experience of a design is appropriate to the capabilities of their browser or device.
5.2. We will test our work only 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 older versions unless agreed separately. If you need an enhanced design for an older browser or specific device, we will provide a separate estimate for that. We will test your design using the latest versions of:
– Windows: Internet Explorer
– MacOS: Safari and Chrome
– iOS: Safari on iPhone and iPad
– Android: Google Chrome
5.3. We won’t test on specific devices and browsers beyond this unless agreed separately. If you need us to test using alternative devices, we will provide a separate estimate.
6. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)
6.1 You understand we don’t guarantee improvements to your search engine ranking, but that we do have the expertise to advise you on writing content well for the web and that websites we develop are made accessible to search engines.
7. OUR WORK AND THIRD PARTIES
7.1. Most software contains bugs and we can’t guarantee our work or that from third party plugins, themes and services will be free from error. We can work to resolve bugs in software, work with third parties to resolve their bugs and find new plugins, themes and services where needed but we won’t be liable to you or any third-party for damages, including lost profits, lost savings or other incidental, consequential or special damages.
7.2. Your liability to us will be limited only to the price stated in this contract. You won’t be liable to us or any third-party for damages, including lost profits, lost savings or other incidental, consequential or special as a result of the software and services that we use.
7.3. 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.
7.4. The services we provide in respect to your website the UK Data Protection Act 2018 and our GDPR statement is available at https://thewebfoundry.net/about/terms-and-conditions/.
8. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
8.1 You guarantee the written content you provide is original, or that you have the rights to use it. You also guarantee you have licenses to use images which are owned by photographers or have been purchased from stock libraries. You agree to protect us from any claim by owners of copyrighted material. When our work requires licensed fonts or images from stock libraries, we’ll ask you to purchase them so you’ll be licensed to use them.
9. DISPLAYING OUR WORK
9.1. We reserve the right to display any aspect of our work as long as doing so doesn’t breach any confidentiality agreement. This may include sketches, work-in-progress designs and the finished project on our website, in magazine articles, or in books.
10. PAYMENTS AND END OF SUPPORT AGREEMENT
10.1. Our payment terms are 21 days from the date of invoice. We issue invoices electronically and our bank account details will be included. Our invoices will be in GBP pounds. If your currency is different, you agree your payments will be the same value.
10.2. Charges associated with international transfers of funds will be your responsibility.
10.3. Services may suspend services if invoices are left unpaid beyond 21 days.
10.4. If you wish to renew this agreement, we can provide you with an updated quote towards the end of the agreed period to either make a further agreement or request a backup of the site in order to pursue hosting and support options elsewhere.
11. UPDATES OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS
11.1. We may update or modify these terms and conditions from time to time to ensure that the service remains secure, reliable, stable and up-to-date. If any changes are made, we will notify you via email.