Terms and Conditions

1 - General notes

Please note, I'm no lawyer, I've an English O Level from many years ago so hopefully these terms will makes some sense and will ideally be simple, easy to read and probably totally unenforceable in any court of law.

2 - Procedure

Upon contacting S4X I will email you for a full briefing on what is required by your website. If you are happy with this brief I will provide a quote for your system. More likely I will need lots of additional information first and will therefore either call you to discuss your requirements or will arrange to meet you in person and get all your needs written down. It is important at this stage to be very clear about what is required by the website as I will design and build your website to this specification. A printed agreement will be signed by both parties and an initial payment made by the client. If during the build process either your requirements change or you remember something important you forgot to tell me then I will not add this to the system until the original design is complete, signed off and paid for. Additional work on a finished website will be billed either at my hourly rate or as at a fixed agreed price for the work required. Currently my hourly rate is £30/hour and all works will be invoiced once complete.

2.1 - Stages

  1. Contact
  2. Discussion and formal documentation of requirements.
  3. Quote submission
  4. Agreement Signing and initial payment (one third the total agreed price)
  5. Coding and internal testing of your website
  6. External testing by yourself and colleagues (stages 6 and 7 can continue until you are happy your original requirement list has been completed)
  7. Sign off of agreed specification and second payment (one third the total agreed price)
  8. Building of any additional functions required. Meticulous attention at stage 2 should remove this requirement to add additional function post build. This stage can incur additional costs although minor revisions will not be charged for.
  9. You set up your content to the website if your site includes as CMS.
  10. Request your domain name to be directed to your new website.
  11. Final payment
  12. In the event that your site is likely to require regular maintence outside the scope of the CMS then a SLA can be discussed at this stage however usually a website should require no further coding once complete.

3 - Hosting

Your website will be hosted by an external web hosting company. The cost of hosting your website will be agreed at stage 3 and be payable monthly or anually as you prefer. The hosting costs of your website may include maximum bandwidth or disk usage restrictions, if these restrictions are exceeded it may be necessary to increase your hosting cost. In the event that payment is not received within reasonable period we reserve the right to display a holding page in place of your site.

If you wish to host your own website on your own servers or using a web hosting company of your own choosing you are welcome to do so at any stage after stage 8. We will provide you with all the php script files associated with your website and an export dump of your MySQL database. We will not be able to provide support or assistance with any issues you have once you take control of your own website.

We do not provide domain hosting but can assist you with deciding which host to use and purchase/administration of your domain name.

We do not provide email services.

4 - Search Engines

You will have access to your websites meta tag data. This will allow you to set up the page title, keywords and description tags for your website or for each page on your site. All websites use rewrite rules so that links are always referenced to .HTML documents despite the site being database driven. This allows search engine robots to fully index your website as if every page was written individually in HTML. Accessibilily standards and page layouts are optimised for search engine placement. If you require your website submitting to specific search engines you are free to do this in person or we are happy to research particular search engines on your behalf.

5 - Changes to our Terms and Conditions

We reserve the right to modify these terms and conditions as required. All existing clients will be emailed regarding any changes to these terms and will have the right to appeal if the changes affect their client agreement in any way.

6 - Marketing

We reserve the right to include a link to our website at the very bottom of every page or in a visible location chosen by you. This link will be displayed in the main text font and colour of your website and a at size acceptable to you but at a minimum font size of 9px, i.e "Website Developent by S4X Services"

Web Development by s4x Services