These terms apply to website design, build and maintenance services supplied by DesignWebb. They are written in plain English. When you accept a quote from us, you agree to these terms as well as to anything specific set out in that quote.
1. About us and these terms
"DesignWebb", "we" and "us" means Jack Southall-Webb, a sole trader, trading as DesignWebb, of 3 Azalea Road, CV37 7DH (email contact@designwebb.com). "You" means the business or organisation we are working for.
Our services are for businesses and organisations only. We do not provide them to consumers, meaning individuals buying for personal purposes outside a trade, business or profession. By asking for a quote or accepting one, you confirm that you are acting for the purposes of your business or organisation. If you are a sole trader or an individual, you confirm that you want the website for your business.
If there is a conflict between these terms and your accepted quote, the quote applies to that project.
2. The services
We design and build websites for businesses and organisations, and offer ongoing website maintenance. The exact work for your project, such as the number of pages, the features and the price, is set out in your quote. Anything not in the quote is outside the project and will be quoted separately.
We will carry out the services with reasonable skill and care, and we are responsible for delivering the services set out in your quote. We may use software, templates, tools and other providers to do so. We do not promise particular results from your website, for example search-engine rankings, number of enquiries or sales.
3. Quotes and acceptance
Our quotes are free, and each quote links to these terms. Project prices are confirmed in a quote before any work begins. The quote says what is included, including whether domain registration or hosting is included (see section 8). A quote is valid for 14 days from the date we send it, unless it says otherwise.
The agreement between us begins when you accept the quote in writing (an email reply is enough). We will not start work until then.
Quotes are based on what you tell us at the start. If the project changes or turns out to need more than described, we will tell you and agree any change to the price or timing with you before doing the extra work.
4. Fees and payment
Prices. The prices on our website are starting points ("from" prices). Your quote states the price for your project. Prices are in pounds sterling.
VAT. We are not currently VAT registered, so we do not charge VAT. If that changes, we will tell you before it affects you.
No deposit. We do not currently ask for a deposit.
Paying for the project. We will invoice the project before the completed website is published or launched. The invoice is payable within 7 days of the invoice date and, in any case, the full balance must be paid before the website is published or launched, unless we agree a different arrangement in writing. We may hold back publishing until we have received payment.
Other invoices. Other invoices, for example for extra work you have agreed, are payable within 7 days of the invoice date unless the invoice says otherwise.
How to pay. We currently accept payment by bank transfer only.
Late payment. If an invoice is not paid on time, we may pause work and any maintenance until it is paid. Because this is a business-to-business contract, we may also claim statutory interest and fixed compensation under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998.
5. Design, revisions and approval
We will show you the design before we build the website. The quoted project price includes 2 rounds of revisions. A "round" means one set of changes sent to us together. Additional revisions, and changes outside the agreed scope, may be charged separately. We will only charge for them if we have told you the cost and you have agreed to it first.
We will ask for your approval before the website goes live. When you approve the design or the finished website in writing (an email is enough), we treat that stage as accepted.
6. Your responsibilities
To keep the project on track, you agree to:
give us accurate, complete information and the content we ask for in good time;
reply to our questions, and give feedback and approvals, promptly and in writing (email is fine);
check the finished website carefully, tell us about any problems, and approve it before launch;
tell us if anything on the website becomes out of date, such as opening hours, prices or contact details, unless we are looking after that under a maintenance agreement;
make sure that your business information and the content on your website are lawful.
You are responsible for the accuracy of what your website says about your business, and for the legal requirements that apply to your business and industry, such as the information you must show about your business. This does not reduce our responsibility for our own work.
7. Your content
You may supply text, images, logos and other material ("your content"). You promise that you own it or have permission to use it on your website, and that it does not break anyone's rights or the law. You are responsible for any licence fees for material you supply.
If we source images, fonts or other material for you, we will tell you and use only material we are allowed to use for this purpose. You give us permission to use your content to carry out the work.
8. Domains and hosting
A website needs a domain name (its web address) and somewhere to be hosted. This is how it normally works with us:
You pay for them. You generally pay for your own domain name and hosting, separately from our fees. Domain and hosting costs are not included in our website prices unless your quote clearly says so.
You own and control the accounts. Ideally the domain and hosting accounts are in your name and under your control. You give us the access we need to build and maintain the website. Where we can, we ask you to add us as a user, rather than sharing your password.
We can help. We may help you buy or set up a domain or hosting, and change DNS settings (the settings that point your domain to your website) where needed. We will do this in your accounts and in your name, and we do not own or control your domain unless we have agreed that in writing.
Accounts in our name. We do not intend to hold your domain or hosting in our own account. If, for a practical reason, an account is ever set up in our name, we will tell you first and, if you ask, transfer it to you. You would pay any fee the provider charges for the transfer.
Renewals are yours. You are responsible for renewing your domain and hosting and paying for them on time, unless we have agreed otherwise in writing. If a renewal is missed, your website may go offline or you could lose your domain. Please keep the account contact details up to date.
Domain and hosting services are supplied by third-party companies under their own terms. We are not responsible for outages, price changes or other problems with those companies, although we will help you deal with them where we reasonably can. This does not limit our responsibility for our own work (see section 12).
9. Website maintenance
If you choose our maintenance service, currently advertised from £25 a month, the price for your website is set out in your quote. The details below apply unless your quote says otherwise.
What is included. Minor website updates, basic content changes, small fixes and general website maintenance, all on your existing website.
What these mean. Minor updates and basic content changes are, for example, changing text, swapping or adding a few photos, or updating opening hours, prices or contact details on existing pages. Small fixes are, for example, correcting a typo, a broken link or a small layout problem on an existing page. General maintenance is routine upkeep of your existing website. We do not monitor it around the clock.
What is not included. New pages, major redesigns, new functionality, substantial content creation, and any other work that goes beyond routine maintenance.
Minor update or new project? A minor update is a small change to your existing website. Anything that needs substantial design or development work, a new page, new functionality or significant changes to the structure of the website is a separate project, and we will quote for it separately. If your requests regularly go beyond minor updates, we will tell you and quote for the extra work.
No set hours. The maintenance fee is not a set number of hours. Unused maintenance does not carry over to the next month. This is not an unlimited service: it covers reasonable, routine requests. If the number or size of your requests goes beyond routine maintenance, we will tell you and agree what happens next, for example a quote for the extra work. We will deal with requests within a reasonable time, but we do not promise a fixed response time unless your quote says so.
Billing. We invoice the monthly fee on the same date each month as the date the maintenance began. The invoice is payable within 7 days, by bank transfer.
Ending maintenance. Either of us can end the maintenance service by giving 30 days' notice. The service stays in place during the notice period, and the monthly fee remains due for that time.
Third-party limits. We will use reasonable skill and care, but we cannot guarantee that your website will always be available or free of faults, because it depends on third-party hosting and other services outside our control.
10. Ownership
It helps to separate four things:
The finished website. Until you have paid the project in full, we keep all rights in the work and you may not publish it. Once you have paid in full, we agree to transfer to you the copyright and other rights that we own in the website design and the content we create specially for you, apart from the items below. The law requires a transfer of copyright to be in writing and signed, so we will sign and send you a short written assignment within a reasonable time after you have paid in full. The transfer takes effect when we have signed it. From full payment, and until we have signed, you may use and change the finished website for your business under a non-exclusive licence from us.
Your content. Your text, images, logos and other material stay yours. You let us use them to carry out the work.
Our own materials. We keep ownership of the tools, code, libraries, templates and know-how that we created before your project, or that we reuse across projects. From full payment, we give you a permanent, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use, copy and adapt them as part of your website and to keep it working. You may not resell them or use them separately from your website.
Third-party materials. Fonts, images, plug-ins, templates, software and similar materials made by others remain subject to their own licences. Where a licence limits what you can do with them, for example by requiring a subscription, a credit or a renewal, we will tell you, and that licence applies to you instead of any ownership.
Other developers. You are free to have another developer or provider host, change, move or maintain your website. Once you have paid in full, we will give you a copy of the website files if you ask. Our licence above covers their work on your website, and the third-party licences above still apply.
Tools and AI-generated material. We may use software and automated tools, including AI-assisted tools, when creating your website. We give you the rights we have in the material we deliver, by assignment or licence as set out above. We cannot promise that copyright exists in every item made with such tools, or that a tool provider's terms will not limit how an item can be used. We will tell you if we know of a limit that affects you.
11. Showing your website in our portfolio
We may ask whether we can show your completed website in the DesignWebb portfolio and in our marketing. We never assume you agree, and we will show it only if you give permission. An email is enough. If you do not agree, we will not display your website as a DesignWebb example.
If you agree and later withdraw your permission (an email is enough), we will stop using your website in the portfolio and marketing places we control as soon as reasonably possible. We cannot recall copies that have already been shared elsewhere.
12. Third-party software and services
Your website may depend on third-party services, such as hosting, domain names, form services, plug-ins, APIs or other software. Those services are provided by other companies under their own terms and privacy policies, and they may change or be withdrawn. We are not responsible for their availability or for changes they make, but we will tell you about anything that affects your website and help you find an alternative where we reasonably can. This does not limit our responsibility for our own work, including taking reasonable care when we choose or set up those services for you.
13. Delays and silent clients
We will give you an estimate of timings and try to keep to it, but dates are estimates unless the quote states them as fixed. If you are slow to provide content, feedback or payment, the timetable moves back accordingly.
If we do not hear from you for 14 days, we will send you a reminder. If there is still no reply 7 days after that, we may pause the project until you get back in touch. We can then resume it, depending on our availability. Fees for work already done remain payable.
Events outside our control. Neither of us is responsible for a delay or failure caused by something outside our reasonable control, for example illness, power or internet failures, or a problem at a hosting or domain provider, as long as we tell the other promptly and take reasonable steps to limit the effect. This does not excuse payment for work already done. If it goes on for a long time, either of us may end the project by written notice, and section 15 explains what you pay for work already done.
14. Cancellation and ending the agreement
By you. You can cancel the project by telling us in writing. Work starts when you have accepted the quote and we have begun design or other project work. If work has not started, you will not be charged for the project. If it has started, you will pay for the work already done and the costs we have already incurred for your project, worked out as set out in section 15.
If we let you down. If we seriously break these terms and do not put it right within a reasonable time after you tell us in writing, you may end the agreement. You will then pay only for work done to the standard we agreed. This does not limit any other right you have to end the agreement under the law.
By us. We may end the agreement if you do not pay, if you seriously break these terms and do not fix it within a reasonable time after we ask, or if you ask us to do something unlawful. We will give you notice in writing, and you will pay for work done up to that point, worked out as set out in section 15.
Maintenance. The 30-day notice in section 9 applies to the maintenance service.
What happens next. Even if you pay what is properly due for work already done, you do not automatically own unfinished work, and you may not use it. We can agree in writing to transfer it separately. Terms that are meant to continue after the agreement ends, including ownership, liability and payment, continue.
15. Refunds
We do not take deposits, so there is normally nothing to refund if you cancel before work starts.
If you cancel, or we end the agreement, after work has started, the amount you owe for the project is: (a) a fair share of the agreed project price for the work done so far, judged by how far the project has got (for example, whether the design is complete and how much of the website has been built); plus (b) any third-party costs we have genuinely paid or committed for your project and cannot recover, which we will show you. We will send you the calculation in writing.
If you have already paid more than that amount, we will refund the difference by bank transfer as soon as reasonably possible. If you have paid less, we will invoice you for the difference, payable as set out in section 4. Payments are not automatically refundable in full.
Nothing in this section affects any rights you have that cannot be excluded by law, including your right to a remedy if we do not do what we agreed.
16. Defects and corrections
If the finished website does not work as described in your quote, tell us in writing as soon as you can. If a genuine defect or bug was caused by our work, we will fix it at no extra charge for a reasonable period after launch.
These are not defects, and we may charge separately for dealing with them:
new features and new design requests;
changes to the agreed scope, or changes you ask for after you have approved the work;
problems caused by third-party services, such as hosting, domain providers, plug-ins or APIs;
problems caused by changes made by anyone other than us;
problems caused by your content or by instructions you gave us.
This section does not remove our responsibility for our own breach or negligence. If our work is defective, you may also have the remedies described in section 15 and in section 17.
17. Liability
Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be limited or excluded by law.
Subject to that, and because you are a business:
we are not liable for loss that is indirect, or that we could not reasonably have foreseen when the agreement was made;
we are not liable for loss or corruption of data unless it was caused by our failure to use reasonable skill and care, and you are responsible for keeping your own copies of your content;
our total liability to you for all claims arising from the same project or service, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, is limited to the total fees paid or payable by you for that project or service (for maintenance, the fees paid or payable for the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim); and
we are not liable to the extent that a problem is caused by your content, by instructions you gave us, by third-party services, or by changes to the website made by anyone other than us. This does not apply where the problem was also caused by our breach or negligence.
The limit above does not reduce our duty to correct defects under section 16 or to refund money that is properly due to you under section 15.
18. Personal data and records
Our own records. We are responsible, as the "controller", for the personal data we handle for our own business, such as enquiries, quotes, invoices and records. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it. We keep project and financial records for up to 6 years after our relationship with you ends, where needed for legal, accounting or tax purposes, and we keep enquiries that don't lead to work for 12 months after our last contact. We delete personal data sooner where there is no good reason to keep it.
Your website's data. If your website collects personal data, for example through a contact or booking form, you will normally be the "controller" of that data. You are responsible for your own privacy notice, for having a lawful basis, for a cookie notice where one is needed, and for complying with data protection law. If you would like our help with these, we will agree it in your quote.
When we handle it for you. We may sometimes handle that personal data on your behalf, for example if we receive form submissions for you, set up or maintain a form that sends enquiries to you, or log in to a part of your website where personal data is stored. Where we do, we act as your "processor" for that data, and these terms and your quote are the contract that UK data protection law requires between us. In that case:
the subject matter, nature, purpose, kinds of personal data, people it relates to, and how long we handle it, are those described in your quote or, if it does not say, those needed to provide the service you asked for, for as long as we provide it;
we will use the data only on your documented instructions (your quote and later emails count), including about sending it outside the UK, unless the law requires otherwise, and we will tell you if we think an instruction breaks data protection law;
we will keep it confidential, make sure anyone we allow to access it is bound to confidentiality, and take appropriate security measures;
you give us general permission to use other providers to help us with your project. We will tell you if we change them so that you can object, and each must be bound by equivalent obligations;
we will help you, where reasonably needed, to answer people's data protection requests and to meet your security, breach-reporting and impact-assessment duties, and we will tell you without undue delay if we become aware of a personal data breach affecting that data;
when our work for you ends, we will delete or return it, as you choose, unless the law requires us to keep it; and
we will give you the information you reasonably need to check that we are meeting these obligations, and allow and contribute to reasonable audits by you or someone you appoint, on reasonable notice.
If your project involves handling personal data on a large scale or of a sensitive kind, we may agree a separate written data processing agreement with you.
19. General
Whole agreement. These terms and your accepted quote are the whole agreement between us for the project, and replace anything said earlier. Nothing in this clause limits liability for fraud.
Changes. We may update these terms for future projects. The terms that apply to a project are the ones in force when you accepted the quote. Any change to an existing project must be agreed in writing (an email is enough).
Notices. Notices can be sent by email. Emails to us go to contact@designwebb.com. Emails to you go to the address in your quote or the one you last gave us. Please tell us if it changes.
If part of these terms doesn't work. If a part is found to be unenforceable, the rest still applies.
Other people. Only you and we can enforce this agreement. The Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 does not give anyone else rights under it.
Passing on the agreement. You may not transfer the agreement to someone else without our written agreement. We may transfer it to another business that takes over DesignWebb, if we tell you and your rights are not reduced.
20. Governing law
This agreement, and any dispute arising from it, is governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.
21. Contact
If you have any questions about these terms, or a concern about our work, please contact us at contact@designwebb.com. We will try to put things right.