Creating a website is not a simple process. Essentially, you are building the online image of your business. It may completely change your life, so don’t ignore any parts of it. And yet, so many clients fail to take care of the basic things. Signing a website development contract is just the beginning. This is also the first time that many people make key mistakes. When you are excited about your new journey, it is easy not to pay attention to some of the details. In fact, it may, unfortunately, come back to you at a later stage and cause some problems. We want to bring it to your attention now, hoping that it will help you to avoid problems in the future. So we’ve gathered the most important things to consider when making a deal with a web development company.
Before you decide to proceed with the website development, you should ask the company to show you a sample of the contract and look for the following things in it:
Ownership of software
You need to make sure that after the development is done and paid for, you will be the owner of the software.
Subcontracting
You should make sure that the company that you are signing a contract with will be the company that will actually work on your project. It should not be executed by any other company. Why? Because, as sooner or later, when things go wrong, no one will take responsibility for that.
Confidentiality
Ideally, no one wants your competition to know about your ideas and plan. Thus, there should be a clause about the confidentiality of all information provided by you to the company.
Warranty
Good companies should state in their contract that the website will be free of bugs. If any are found, created by the developers, even after the final payment, should be fixed free of charge. You don’t want to end up paying again and again for the same project just because someone didn’t do a good job in the first place, right?
Copyrights
Not many clients consider having an audit of the code by other companies after development is done, and in some cases, they realize that their project was build using software that they have no license for. This is a big issue as not only may you face legal charges but also you will incur additional costs for the licensing.
Payment Terms
You should not be paying the full amount after the project initialization. It is normal practice to pay 30-50% in the first stage, as quite often a company has to purchase required materials and invest the majority of the time but paying the full amount is not a good idea. Ideally, the second payment should be made after you can test your product.
Protection from delays
Both parties should agree on a way of protecting themselves from any delays in both delivery of the project and payments for the company.
Signing a website development contract may be tricky. But if you remember the things we mentioned above, everything should be fine. These things should help you to get your project done on time and without any problems. Is there anything else that we have missed?
You can check the ready-made contract templates here.
In case of any questions or problems just contact us.