Posts Tagged ‘contract’

I regularly give business consulting services to a wide variety of people – from veteran business owners to startupists or companies looking to ride the Ecommerce wave. When I meet with a client for a professional consultation, I make sure to sign a consultation agreement before I even schedule the meeting.

I know it sucks to sign a legal type of documents, especially when you’re just getting to know someone. But I’d recommend it in this particular case. It will protect you from late payments or arguments on the price of the consultation, or even not getting paid at all… It seems crazy but a lot of people are just plain dishonest.

The agreement also clearly states the terms and frame of the service you are going to provide. You’re not taking on any project just yet and you haven’t agreed on any specific price. Right now it’s just a consultation – and it’s important to have that in writing.

The agreement also includes a Credit Card Authorization Form. (more…)

Every time I do my routine check on the traffic stats of our web design company’s website, I am amazed by the growing numbers of web designers, web developers, and web design companies who are consistently reading our blog and repeatedly visiting our website. So here is another post in our web design company resources series for all the web design professionals who are loyally following us! This time I am attaching a professional non-disclosure agreement template in a Microsoft Word format. Enjoy!

This non-disclosure agreement template is faithful to our philosophy when it comes to this type of document – it’s clear, concise, and simple. It’s written in plain English (as much as possible) instead of a complex legal jargon, and it will protect you and your clients. (more…)

I recently reviewed some web analytics on the volume of traffic that we get on our web design company website, and I saw that a recent blog post generated a very significant volume. In that blog post, I gave out one of the email templates I use to respond to inquiries.

So I decided to continue in the same spirit and start a new series of blog posts where I’ll be giving out material that we use on a daily basis here to run our state-of-the-art web design firm from our New York location! This time, I am attaching our web design contract in a MS Word format!

For a long time we used lengthy contracts, with plenty of stupid legal jargon, and a lot of unnecessary stuff nobody really understood. We kept changing our contract to make more sense, make it easier for us to explain it to our clients, while still protecting us and our creative methodology. It took a long time until we finally got it right! We’ve been using this final version for all of our web design projects ever since.

Here are a few good things about this contract:

1. There is basically no legal jargon – everything is written in plain English.
2. There are no project scope, deliverable, timeline, etc in the contract. That stuff we put it in our web design proposals, or we discuss them with the client. The contract is a general contract of service – not a project management or strategic planning document.
3. It’s only 4 pages!
4. The contract is simple, clear, uncluttered, flexible, and open.

I’ve uploaded the contract on our server in a Microsoft Word format just for you guys, freelance web designers, and competing web design companies who are following our web design blog! So feel free to use it for your own web design projects!

Coming next! Useful email templates, a bunch of in-depth web design proposals, website architectures, and more!