Between us, Sierra Christianson of Paper+Screen and you, Penny Goffman.

We will always do our best to fulfill your needs and meet your goals, but sometimes it’s best to have a few things written down so that we both know what’s what, who should do what and what happens if stuff goes wrong. In this contract you won’t find complicated legal terms or long passages of unreadable text. We have no desire to trick you into signing something that you might later regret. We do want what’s best for the safety of both parties, now and in the future.

In short
Penny Goffman is hiring us Paper+Screen to develop your website for the estimated total price as outlined in our proposal. Of course it’s a little more complicated, but we’ll get to that.

What Do Both Parties Agree To Do?
As our customer, you have the power and ability to enter into this contract on behalf of your company or organization. You agree to provide us with everything that we’ll need to complete the project – including text, source files and other information – as and when we need it and in the format we ask for. You agree to review our work, provide feedback and approval in a timely manner too. Deadlines work two ways and you’ll also be bound by any dates that we set together. You also agree to stick to the payment schedule set out at the end of this contract.

We have the experience and ability to perform the services you need from us and we will carry them out in a professional and timely manner. Along the way we will endeavor to meet all the deadlines set but we can’t be responsible for a missed launch date or a deadline if you have been late in supplying materials or have not approved or signed off our work on-time at any stage. On top of this we’ll also maintain the confidentiality of any information that you give us.

Design
If we are designing your application we’ll create designs for the look-and-feel, layout and functionality of your website. This contract includes one main design for each page (or piece of design collateral) plus the opportunity for you to make up to three rounds of revisions. If you’re not happy with the designs at this stage, you will pay us in full for all of the work that we have produced (at an hourly rate of $85/hr) until that point and you may either cancel this contract or continue to commission us to make further design revisions at our standard design rates.

We do not cater for people using Microsoft Internet Explorer and cannot predict the behavior of that browser.
We will also test that our designs perform well on Apple’s iPad. We will not test old or abandoned browsers, for example Microsoft Internet Explorer, previous versions of Apple’s Safari, Mozilla Firefox or Opera unless otherwise specified. If you need us to consider these older browsers, we will charge you at our standard old browser rate for any necessary additional design work, development and testing.

Text Content
We may have written a hundred blog posts but we’re not responsible for writing or inputting any text copy unless we specified it in the original estimate. We’ll be happy to help though, and in addition to the estimate we will charge you at our standard copy writing or content input rate.

Photographs
You will supply us photographs in digital format. If you choose to buy stock photographs we can suggest vendors of stock photography. 

Changes to the Project Scope
The estimate/quotation prices at the beginning of this document are based on the items you communicated to us and amount of work we estimate we’ll need to accomplish everything that you have told us you want to achieve. If you do want to change your mind, add extra flyers or templates or even add new functionality, that won’t be a problem. However, you will be charged accordingly and these additional costs will need to be agreed to before the extra work commences. This additional work will affect deadlines and they will be moved accordingly. We’ll be up front about all of this if and when it happens to make sure we’re all on the same page before proceeding. We may also ask you to put requests in writing so we can keep track of changes. If the nature or functions of the project change significantly throughout the process, we reserve the right to deem the current project cancelled. At this point you will pay us in full for all the work we have done and may commission us to complete the new project based on the new requirements. This will require a new quote and contract.

Legal stuff
If any provision of this agreement shall be unlawful, void, or for any reason unenforceable, then that provision shall be deemed severable from this agreement and shall not affect the validity and enforceability of any remaining provisions.

Phew!

Copyrights
You guarantee to us that any elements of text, graphics, photos, designs, trademarks, or other artwork that you provide us for inclusion in the website are either owned by your good selves, or that you have permission to use them.

When we receive your final payment, copyright is automatically assigned as follows:

You own the graphics and other visual elements that we create for you for this project.

We’ll give you a copy of all files and you should store them really safely as we are not required to keep them or provide any native source files we used to make them.

You also own text content, photographs and other data you provided, unless someone else owns them. We own the markup, CSS and other code and we license it to you for use on only this project. We love to show off our work and share what we have learned with other people, so we reserve the right to display and link to your completed project as part of our portfolio and to write about the project on websites, in magazine articles and in books about web design.

Payments
We are sure you understand how important it is as a small business that you pay the invoices that we send you promptly. As we’re also sure you’ll want to stay friends, you agree to stick tight to the following payment schedule.

• 50% deposit up front
• 50% when the site is ready to go live

But where’s all the horrible small print?
Just like a parking ticket, you can’t transfer this contract to anyone else without our permission. This contract stays in place and need not be renewed. If for some reason one part of this contract becomes invalid or unenforceable, the remaining parts of it remain in place. Although the language is simple, the intentions are serious and this contract is a legal document under exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Wyoming.