As you’ll appreciate not all requirements are the same in regard to both timescales, volume of work and cost. However the majority of the projects we work on centre around the creation and hosting of a new sites. So, we included the Terms & Conditions below to clarify our approach in this area:
Free consultation
The initial meeting to discuss your requirements is a free consultation. Your requirements only will be discussed at this point no work will be carried out by FWD other than to understand your requirement.
Free Planning & Proposal
If you wish to proceed with a proposed Project we will map out how we see the project progressing and draw up a set of realistic expectations, timescales and costs based on our initial discussion. Proposals costs and details are valid for 30 days.
Amendments during development
In order to keep our development and design prices as low as possible, it’s important that we follow processes which enable us to work quickly. With this in mind, we ask you to make sure you brief us about how you want your website to look before we start work (we’ll help you with this by asking lots of relevant questions). Making amendments can really slow our design process down, and push the cost up – so we will provide a mock up image of how we envisage your website will look, before we start the actual build process. We ask that if you want to make amendments to the design, you request changes during the mock-up stage, and not put them off until we’ve started building your site.
Staged payments
When the Plan & Proposal is signed off we will operate a staged payments policy for any web development services we provide to you. Our staged payments policy is as follows:
We will send the 1st invoice for the 50% of the total project fee when we accept your order. You need to pay this invoice before we start work on your website.
The 2nd invoice for the next 25% of the total project fee will be sent on sign-off of the template design and confirmation of the domain name and hosting. You need to pay this invoice before we populate your website with your content and set the site’s status to ‘live’.
The 3rd and final invoice for the remaining 25% of the total project fee will be sent once the website has gone live. You need to pay this invoice within 30 days of the invoice date. If you fail to pay this invoice on time, we reserve the right to disable the website and email addresses, and withhold all relevant passwords, until payment is received.
Please be aware; if you continue to default on the final payment after a further 14 days we will claim interest & compensation under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998. This will be charged at £40 per unpaid interest plus 8.5% and you will be invoiced for this additional amount.
If payment is still outstanding after seven days we will begin legal action which will be confirmed with an ‘Intention to begin legal proceedings’ letter to yourselves.
After your final payment has cleared, we’ll send you our welcome document which contains all relevant passwords and access instructions for your website hosting account, CMS administration details, Email accounts and any other accounts we’ve created for you.
Cancelling your project and our refund policy
Payments are primarily used to fiance the next stage of the development process. If you decide to cancel a project there is a good chance that work has already been undertaken based on the previous payment. Therefore our refund policy is as follows:
If we have completed a stage and you no longer require our services, then no refund will be offered.
If we are in the process of completing a stage of work but it is not yet completed we will halt work on the website and refund 10% of the current stage payment as a gesture of goodwill.
Copyright and ownership
You will own your domain, as long as you continue to pay any recurring registration fees. These are approximately £10 per year for a .com domain, and approximately £10 every two years for a .co.uk domain, including VAT (subject to our supplier’s prevailing rates). Once you have paid our final invoice, you will own all your website pages, and the design of the site (if it’s a bespoke design), and copyright of the website text (whether you’ve written your own text or you’ve paid us to write it for you). You will not own the copyright to any images sourced by us on your behalf, either from our own stock image library or from any other provider of stock images.
Site credits
We’ll add a discreet “website design by Fluid Web Development” (or similar) link at the bottom of each page of your website. If you’ve asked us to source stock images for use on your website, some of these images may be supplied to us (and thus to you) on the condition that the photographer is credited. If this affects any images we’ve sourced for you, we’ll let you know during the design and build process.
Reasonable use policy for ongoing website support
Free ongoing support is included in our web design packages, but this support is provided subject to a reasonable use policy, which is set out below.
Reasonable use includes:
Minor alterations – for example, replacing, adding or deleting content on pages that already exist on your site. Although this will be easy enough to do using the CMS dashboard and we would advise and assist you in understanding this approach as it is by far the quickest and easiest solution.
Making changes to your contact details, setting up new email addresses and forwarders (or making changes to existing email addresses and forwarders).
Liaising with our hosting provider in the rare event that there are any interruptions to the service.
The following are what we consider to be ‘major’ alterations, and are not included in your free support contract:
Making changes to the design of your website.
Making any changes that affect all pages of your website (includes changes to the template, re-branding, etc).
Moving your site to a new hosting provider, or moving your domain registration to a new registrar.
Transferring ownership of your website to someone else.
Major alterations to your website will be charged by the hour and our curent hourly charge is £35. If you have any questions or concerns about any of our terms and conditions, please contact us to discuss them.