Our Standard Terms of Engagement
Using our services
These Standard Terms of Engagement (‘Terms’) apply in respect of all work carried out by us for you, except to the extent that we otherwise agree with you in writing.
By using our services, you are agreeing to these terms as outlined below:
By using our services, you are agreeing to these terms as outlined below:
Services
- The services which we are to provide for you are based on designing and developing a brand and/or a website as specified in our proposal.
- Some of the delivery may require using external paid services, we have outlined what these are and the ongoing costs for these services in our proposal.
- While you continue to host with us, we offer some external services for free (i.e: Elementor Pro and Crocoblock) as indicated in our proposal. If you choose to move your hosting to another party, then these free services would require that you purchase your own valid licence, for each of these services, at your own expense.
Financial
Fees
- The fees which we will charge are indicated in our proposal.
- If the proposal specifies a fixed fee, we will charge this for the agreed scope of our services.
- Work which falls outside that scope will be charged on an hourly rate basis. We will advise you as soon as reasonably practicable if it becomes necessary for us to provide services outside the agreed scope and if requested, give you an estimate of the likely amount of the further costs.
- Where our fees are calculated on an hourly basis, the hourly rates are $80/hour for branding/design and $150/hour for web development. Time spent is recorded in 30 minute units, with time rounded up to the next unit of 30 minutes.
Disbursements and expenses:
- In providing services we may incur disbursements or have to make payments to third parties on your behalf. These will be included in our invoices to you when the expense is incurred. We may require an advance payment for the disbursements or expenses which we will be incurring on your behalf.
GST (if any)
- Is payable by you on our fees and charges.
Invoices
- For branding/design services, we will send interim invoices to you, monthly with payment due on the 20th of the following month.
- For web development services, we will invoice for 50% upfront as a deposit with payment due within 7 days, then the final 50% on completion of the work due on the 20th of the following month..
- For hosting and email, we will invoice quarterly, due on the 20th of the following month.
- For domain name and add-on purchases, we will invoice after purchasing these on your behalf, payment is due on the 20th of the following month.
- For domain and add-on renewals, these are invoiced at least a month before they are due to expire and payment is due on the 20th of the month before the domain renewal date expires.
Payment
- Invoices for other services are payable on the 20th of the following month from the date of the invoice, unless alternative arrangements have been made with us. We may require interest to be paid on any amount which is overdue. Interest may be calculated at the rate 1.5 percent per month from the date payment becomes due until the overdue amount is actually paid. You agree to meet any collection costs in recovery of any overdue account.
Confidentiality
- We will hold in confidence all information concerning you or your business that we acquire during the course of working with you. We will not disclose any of this information to any other person except: to the extent necessary or desirable to enable us to carry out the work required.
Termination
- You may terminate our services at any time.
- On termination we would be able to provide you with your files, designs, logos, domains and website, as long as all of our invoices have been paid for in full or;
An alternative payment agreement has been agreed to by all parties in writing. - You authorise us (without further reference to you) to destroy all files and documents, 1 month after our ongoing engagement ends.
- We would stop all ongoing services and repeating invoices at an agreed date.
Website Backups
- Websites are backed up daily on-site and off-site, we retain these daily backups for 14 days only.
- You authorise us (without further reference to you) to destroy all website files and databases, 1 month after our ongoing engagement ends.
Search Engine Optimisation
- Our standard proposals indicate the setup for organic SEO, this is based on setting up your site with metadata used by search engine bots to index your site, submitting a sitemap for indexing as well as installing your site into Google Analytics and Google Search Console to monitor SEO progress.
- We can not guarantee any ranking positions in Google searches as there are too many factors that can cause a site to rise and fall in rankings, including the content within a site, the internal and external links, site speed, competitors marketing efforts and other factors. We would endeavour to ensure that your site follows best SEO practice at the time of development, these do change over time.
- For ongoing SEO work, this would be agreed to in a new and separate proposal from the site’s initial development proposal, as the work required to improve rankings requires ongoing analysis and tracking, which would be agreed to or charged at an hourly rate.
General
- These Terms apply to any current engagement and also to any future engagement, whether or not we send you another copy of them.
- We are entitled to change these Terms from time to time, in which case we will send you amended Terms.
- Our relationship with you is governed by New Zealand law and New Zealand courts have non- exclusive jurisdiction.
