Contracts Explained
A Contract is a Business and Personal Relationship. A contract is a social document. It helps define a business relationship between you and your client. A Contract is a Legal Relationship. Simply, a contract is an agreement which creates a legally enforceable obligation between the parties.
So what are the essential elements of any web design contract?
- Summary of the project or work to be undertake
- Clear scope of the project or work
- What are both parties agreeing to do?
- What are the design elements that are included in the contract
- Is the text content of the web design project included or not?
- Who will provide photography, videos and who will own the copyrights? Are stock photography accepted? Should images used have a particular license or not?
- Who will program, debug, and update HTML, CSS and JavaScript and other coding elements?
- Who will perform browser testing on all platforms, and then make any changes necessary?
- Who will provide different (responsive) device browsers testing (desktop vs tablet vs mobile) and who will be responsible for any changes?
- Will technical support be included in the web design contract? For how long? Will there be any extra charges under specific conditions?
- Who is responsible for changes and revisions
- Any legal stuff recommended by your lawyer
- Who will own the copyrights and intellectual property of the code and designs?
- How will payments be made and the schedule of payments
- How the transfer of information will be handled
- The dotted line – all of that signature and dates when the web design contract came into effect
How to Put Your Contract Together
Building a good contract is easy to do once you have the right starting point. The easiest way to get started with your own design contract is to download the contract template from a website.
Add your own information to the contract .
Read through and add, remove, customize the contract as necessary.
Make sure you seek legal advice from a contract attorney.
One key tip when customizing your own contract: It's critical to nail down the scope of your project. This means you want to be specific about the number of web pages, whether you're working with a developer, helping with web site hosting, and which source files you'll include.
