Our Terms & Conditions

The purpose of this document is to ensure that you, our customer understand the the terms under which we operate our business with you. To clearly communicate the expectations that you should have of us, those we have of you and what level of liability we accept.

When you pay an invoice you agree to these terms & conditions. At the bottom of all of our invoices we will refer you back to this site. In the past we have tried getting our customers to sign contracts. This has always been a difficult thing to achieve and its all round easier to have the conditions listed here and refer you to them as necessary.

If you think that any aspect of these terms & conditions ares objectionable please contact us to discuss further.

This policy applies to all Forte staff, its customers, or any other persons otherwise affiliated but not employed by Forte, who may utilise its infrastructure, services and/or access its applications with respect to security, privacy and liability.

We’ll always do our best to fulfil your needs and meet your expectations, but it’s important to have things written down so that we both know what’s what, who should do what and when, and what will happen if something goes wrong. In this contract you won’t find any complicated legal terms or long passages of unreadable text. We’ve no desire to trick you into signing something that you might later regret. What we do want is what’s best for both parties, now and in the future.

So in short;

You (Client) are hiring us (Forte Web Design) to design and/or provide maintenance and/or support as needed on your website or web service at the amount agreed upon previously and indicated in the invoice(s).

You: You have the authority to enter into this contract on behalf of yourself, your company or your organisation. You’ll give us everything we need to complete the project as and when and in the format we need it. You’ll review our work, provide feedback and approval in a timely manner too. Deadlines work two ways, so you’ll also be bound by dates we set together. You also agree to stick to the payment schedule set out at the end of this contract.

Us: We have the experience and ability to do everything we’ve agreed with you and we’ll do it all in a professional and timely manner. We’ll endeavour to meet every deadline that’s set and on top of that we’ll maintain the confidentiality of everything you give us.

We create look-and-feel designs, and flexible layouts that adapt to the capabilities of many devices and screen sizes. We create designs iteratively and use predominantly HTML and CSS so we won’t waste time mocking up every template as a static visual. We may use static visuals to indicate a look-and-feel direction (color, texture and typography.) We call that ‘design atmosphere.’

You’ll have plenty of opportunities to review our work and provide feedback. We’ll have regular contact. If, at any stage, you’re not happy with the direction our work is taking, you’ll pay us in full for everything we’ve produced until that point and cancel this contract.

We’re not responsible for writing any text copy. You will provide the content that we are to add to the websites. If you state up front that you cannot do this then we need to work out a way to move forward. You should expect to pay extra for someone to write meaningful wording that describes your business and/or products.

You should supply graphic files in an editable, vector digital format. You should supply photographs in a high resolution digital format.

Browser testing no longer means attempting to make a website look the same in browsers of different capabilities or on devices with different size screens. It does mean ensuring that a person’s experience of a design should be appropriate to the capabilities of a browser or device.
Desktop browser testing

We test our work in current versions of major desktop browsers including those made by Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), Microsoft (Internet Explorer/Edge) and Mozilla Firefox. We won’t test in other older browsers unless you specify otherwise. If you need an enhanced design for an older browser, we can provide an estimate for that.

Testing popular small-screen devices is essential in ensuring that a person’s experience of a design is appropriate to the capabilities of the device they’re using. We test our work in:

- iOS: Safari and Google Chrome
- Android 4.x: Google Chrome and Firefox
We currently don’t test Blackberry, Opera Mini/Mobile, Windows Phone or other mobile browsers. If you need us to test using these, we can provide an estimate for that.

We cannot guarantee any improvement to a search engine ranking, nor can we promise to get a site higher up or to the ‘top of Google’, but we build every site in a way that is accessible to search engines in an effort to increase its chances. A lot of this comes down to the quality of your copy and the effort you take to improve keyword density on your site and build the external links back to your site. Good stable search ranking can take time to establish.

You may already have professional hosting and you might even manage that hosting in-house; if you do, great. If you don’t, we can provide hosting services for you. To achieve this, we can set up your site on a server, plus any statistics software such as Google Analytics and we can provide a separate estimate for that (although it may be built into your quote). As part of this service we can (and often do) provide ongoing support in the way of server maintenance, backups, malware scan and software upgrades to keep your site healthy.

We know how to host websites securely and provide a very economic service.

We know from experience that getting it right the first time can be very difficult. We offer 3 revisions on top of the original before we start charging you for additional time. We don’t like doing this and will alert you to this fact if we think that we should be locking in a revision. Of course you, the client, always have final say and its important that you are happy with the design. Rest assured that we work very hard to make this happen.

However, we don’t want to limit your ability to change your mind or add new requests. We will take your scope of work and break down any new requests each with its own estimate for your approval. This will allow you to have better control over the budget through the course of our ongoing business relationship.

We can’t guarantee that our work will be error-free and so we can’t be liable to you or any third-party for damages, including lost profits, lost savings or other incidental, consequential or special damages, even if you’ve advised us of them. Finally, if any provision of this contract shall be unlawful, void, or for any reason unenforceable, then that provision shall be deemed sever-able from this contract and shall not affect the validity and enforce-ability of any remaining provisions.

First, you guarantee that all elements of text, images or other artwork you provide are either owned by yourselves, or that you’ve permission to use them. Then, when you’re final payment has cleared, copyright will be automatically assigned as follows:

You’ll own the visual elements that we create for this project. We’ll give you source files and finished files, at your request, and you should keep them somewhere safe as we’re not required to keep a copy. You own all elements of text, images and data you provided, unless someone else owns them. We’ll own the unique combination of these elements that constitutes a complete design and we’ll license its use to you, exclusively and in perpetuity for this project only, unless we agree otherwise.

We love to show off our work and share what we’ve learned with other people, so we reserve the right, with your permission, to display and link to your project as part of our portfolio and to write about it on websites, in magazine articles and in books.

Businesses refer service providers to other businesses all the time. Word of mouth is the highest form of praise, and more often than not garners the best new clients. Having a link back to a developer’s site is the web’s version of word of mouth. With your permission, we will include a small footer link that says “Site By Forte Web Design” with a no-follow link back to our website. This will be in addition to the standard Copyright tagline with your own business information.

We’re sure you understand how important it is as a small business that you pay the invoices that we send you promptly. You agree to the following payment schedule. Either

- Make a 100% payment within 30 days of Invoice date, or
- Use a credit card to make the payment earlier. Note a 2% surcharge will apply to cover bank charges.
Where renewable services are provided, a new invoice will be issued when renewal becomes payable.

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. It covers us all for the period that the website/service remains active. 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 Australian law.