Zixus – Website Design Terms & Conditions.
Definitions:
“We”, “us”, and “our” means Zixus and all of its employees, agents, or representatives. “You”, “your”, “the customer” and “the client” means any individual or group that makes use of any of our products or services. Clauses: We will not become involved in any websites that:
contain adult material;
have any direct connection with any political, religious, or military group;
are related to the tobacco industry;
involve any form of gambling;
are offensive or defamatory;
are involved in sending unsolicited bulk e- mail (spam);
are misleading or contain statements that are not true;
are connected with any form of fortune-telling or the occult;
involve any illegal activity (including copyright violations);
we decide to refuse for any reason of our own.
1. If you include any such material in a website hosted by us, we reserve the right to edit or delete such material and/or to suspend supply of any services to you – including taking your website offline if we deem it necessary.
2. It is your responsibility to ensure that any material that is provided by you to us for use on your website does not infringe on any copyright laws or trademarks. We will not be held responsible for any matters rising, should such material be found to be in breach of any law, either UK or Worlwide. You therefore agree to indemnify us against any legal action that may result from material that appears on your website.
3. You must not send unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) using any email system provided by us. You must not use our mail system which is designed for normal B2B email for sending bulk email via PC based email software such as Outlook or Outlook Express. This type of email should use a dedicated newsletter service which we can advise on.
4. You must not knowingly send or execute any form of computer virus.
5. You must not send chain letters in any form, including e-mail.
6. You must not use our email service to distribute newsletters. Our email service has standard and reasonable email sending limits which have been defined to protect all email users on our server. If you need to send large amounts of email, we suggest you use a 3rd party service such as icontact.com for newsletters or authsmtp.com for a simple outsourced smtp (outbound email redirection) service that can support large volume email.
7. You must provide us with your postal address, telephone number, and e-mail address and endeavour to keep us updated as soon as these details change in order to maintain communication links. We reserve the right to contact you via post, telephone, or e-mail for matters relating to the work we are undertaking on your behalf, or relating to these terms and conditions.
8. We do undertake to back up your data for you, but we cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage that results from our provision of this service, and whilst we will take all reasonable steps to safeguard your data, we provide no guarantees as to the reliability, accessibility, or security of backed- up data.
9. You must ensure that your site and all of your activities in relation to it, comply with all relevant data protection and other legislation for the UK.
10. You must take reasonable precautions to protect any user names and passwords that are used in connection with any products or services we supply, and to prevent unauthorized persons from obtaining or using them.
11. You must take reasonable precautions to protect your personal computer from Virus or Spyware attacks as such attacks could possibly compromise your hosting account on our server. If your website becomes compromised by way of a hacking attack, Zixus will charge for setting up a Hack Monitoring and Un-hacking service. Zixus will not unhack a customer site at no charge, but will offer free guidance throughout the process. Unhacking a CMS website can be a timely task and so this activity will always be chargeable. If it’s believed the infected website is causing reputational damage to the server it’s hosted on, it will be taken offline as soon as we become aware of the issue so as to protect our server and other customers from the impact of the infected website. We will endeavour to keep downtime to a minimum but cannot give any assurances over resolution due to the nature of hacked websites.
12. You agree to supply to us in a timely manner any text, images, or other material that may be required for the creation of your website, as requested by us, and in the format(s) agreed between us. Images should be sent to us in the appropriate sizes for the intended website purpose.
13. You agree to communicate with us in a timely manner on matters such as website development, hosting and billing.
14. Whilst our websites normally perform well in the search engines, there is no guarantee of performance of any kind in this respect. If search engine ranking is important to you, you should consider one of our search engine optimisation plans. We do not allow any other SEO companies to undertake this type of activity on any of our customers websites.
15. Where your requirements for the website we are constructing for you change or are added to or deleted from in any way, we reserve the right to amend the amount we charge you to reflect the changes. We will inform you if there is any increased charge involved before proceeding with extra or amended requirements.
16. Unless otherwise agreed in a proposal, all website projects will be based on Zixus creating up to 10 pages of content, leaving the balance of required pages down to the client to add.
17. Where a requirement is withdrawn, we reserve the right to charge the full price (or a proportion thereof) for the requirement or feature, even though it may not be used. However, we will normally only do this if we have already spent any time or money on developing the requirement or feature. This includes those customers who choose not to go live with either a partially of fully completed development. In such cases, we will normally charge the full quoted price of the development. Any further work undertaken after the design of your website has commenced will also be bound by these terms and conditions.
18. Any estimates relating to the time of delivery of any product or service to you are subject to change. We cannot be held liable for the consequences of any delay that might occur in delivering products or services to you.
19. All source code that is used in the creation of your website remains our property and may not be used (except in its original intended context) without our consent. This includes but is not limited to code written using: HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, ASP, and ASP.Net. This clause does not apply if the material is already freely available in the public domain i.e. Open Source GNU Public License for Products such as Joomla, WordPress and OpenCart but is not limited to just these products.
20. You retain the copyright to any text, images, or other material that you supply. We retain the copyright to any text, images, or other material that we supply, and grant you license to use them only in their original intended context as defined by us.
21. We will not be held responsible for any loss or damage however caused, that results from the provision or use of our products or services, including but not limited to any printed or digital materials that may come into our possession.
22. If you contravene any of these clauses, we reserve the right to cease supplying all services, and to remove any connection between us and you that may appear on your site immediately. Contravention of any of these clauses implies that you wish to terminate our agreement with you, and any outstanding fees would become due immediately.
23. We reserve the right to include a link to our website on every page of your website that we design. For customers that do not want this link on their website, it can be removed for 25% of the project price.
24. We reserve the right to amend these terms and conditions at any time without notice, although we will endeavor to notify you of any changes in advance.
25. We reserve the right to cancel any of our agreements with you at any time if we believe you are contravening any of our terms by issuing you with a ‘Notice of Termination of Service’ email. The ‘Notification of Termination of Service’ is the only official mechanism by which a contract may be cancelled by Zixus. Any other form of correspondance, no matter what the content or type will not be deemed an official notice of termination of service.
You have a similar right to terminate any agreements held between us by providing 7 day’s notice in writing or email, however on so doing you will become immediately liable for all outstanding charges, including the full cost of any web design or other work that we have started whether complete or not.
26. Upon termination of any agreement, you are liable for all outstanding fees, which will become payable immediately.
27. For custom or eCommerce websites or for projects over £1000, a deposit of 50% of the quoted price is required before we start work on your website, unless otherwise agreed with us. We will then require a 25% interim payment when approximately 75% of the agreed work is complete and a further 25% on completion but before going live. For projects under £1000, we take the amount in full at the start of the project. No contract of any kind may be construed by anything that appears on our website. However, these terms and conditions are applicable from the moment you instruct us to begin work on your behalf.
28. All fees must be paid in full within 14 days of the invoice date unless otherwise agreed with us. We reserve the right to de-activate your website and/or cease providing any goods or services to you at any time and to charge interest and recover our credit-control costs from you if any payments that are due from you are late. During the development of a website, we may provide you with a URL link and/or private access to a prototype version of your website which will be visible throughout the project. You must inform us immediately if there is any aspect of the prototype site which you feel is unsatisfactory for any reason whatsoever, but please bear in mind that this is still in the development stage and therefore may not be entirely accurate or up to date. In the event that you are not satisfied that the agreed work has been successfully completed, you must inform us immediately, and state the full reasons for your dissatisfaction. Upon resolution of the items you raise, the work will be deemed to be complete, and payment will become due.
29. We cannot be held responsible for any products, services, or facilities provided by a third party to us for the build or hosting or any other service related to your website, including but not limited to web hosting and associated features. In any case, our liability shall be entirely limited to the sum paid to us by you.
30. Our hosting accounts and website solutions are only to be used in conjunction with the website solutions developed by us and not for any other purpose ie: ebay shop or image hosting, personal file storage etc.
a. No other companies will be given access to customer hosting accounts to perform SEO on any of our customer website solutions unless it can be proved that we are not able to provide a similar service at competitive prices (UK only comparision). This also applies to any other service we may provide, where we able to offer a full and comprehensive complimentary web service.
b. Hosting invoices must be settled before or on the due by date, otherwise our automatic system will disable the service. Our support and billing system sends out ample invoice created emails to the email address on file, as well as reminder emails and finally unpaid reminders so there will always be ample time to settle those prior to or on the due date.
c. Customers are not allowed to give access to either their hosting account or their websites for the purposes of outsourced design or development work, if this work could otherwise be undertaken by us at a similar cost / quality. This price comparison excludes outsourced overseas work or work undertaken my ‘friends or relatives’ or other non qualified persons as they are not considered equivalent in terms of quality and cost for UK businesses.
d. If an overdue hosting invoice is not settled within 30 days of the due date, the hosting account will be permanently removed from our systems. A backup of the website will be available for the customer for up to 30 days as of 1 workding day prior to the the due date, but a fee of £70 will be made to make this available. Alternatively, the same fee £70 will be charged to reinstate the last backup available back onto our server if required.
31. Although we are very confident in the high quality of our products and services, it is virtually impossible for Zixus to guarantee that our work will be 100% free of bugs or errors, primarly as the main files for the CMSs we use are not coded by ourselves. If an error or ommission in the work is found, we will normally correct the problem quickly and without further incident. However, if an error or ommission in the website development is found and this should result in damage to your business or result in a legal dispute, you agree not to hold Zixus liable for any damages of any kind. This includes exceeding the purchase price paid by you to Zixus for the development work.
32. The price paid by you unless otherwise agreed, is for a single website which allows you to use that on one single domain (excluding normal domain pointers). If you require a copy of your site for another project or domain, a single fee of 50% of the initial purchase price will be payable but this is limited to the customer in question.
33. You are not permitted to distribute a copy of your site without prior consent and payment from Zixus. Any legal dispute between you and us will be settled in the courts of England.
34. 3rd Party Plugins, licenses and support
Zixus provides a fully managed end to end development and support service* . In order that we can provide timely and efficient support, we require that clients do not install any plugins themselves, nor give access to their website to other developers for either design and or development purposes . The process of selecting and installing plugins to meet a specific need is therefore the responsibility of Zixus and not the customer. Failure to abide by this term could lead to website issues, website hacking and potentially could lead to major server instability or availability affecting all of our customers so it is essential for continued service that this term is met. If a customer installs a plugin, we reserve the right to terminate support for that customer and will charge for any and all corrective action required to either remove or replace a plugin that is deemed by us to be unfit to use. Any problems that occur, including any external charges of any kind affecting our service that we can prove to be the result of the unofficial plugin will be charged in full to the customer concerned without exception.
*support includes updates to latest current major CMS version being used and does not include any migration / upgrade to a new major version. Major CMS version changes may require extensive work to ensure compatibility which will be charged at our normal hourly rate and as such are considered a small development activity. This equally applies to any theme being used regardless of the CMS.
The CLIENT must satisfy themselves prior to accepting the QUOTATION or PROPOSAL, that the functionality of the listed extensions meet their requirements.
Unless you have specifically purchased and paid a separate license fee for plugin support, updates or license we may choose to install 3rd Party Extensions under our own multi-site license. In these cases you will not be able to download updates yourself or request support directly from the extension developer. We will provide you with updates, on request, for up to 12 months from the commencement date of your development unless we have terminated or not renewed our multi-site license for the extension.
If you require the facility to download updates or receive extension support directly from the extension developer after leaving our hosting and support service then you will need to purchase your own license directly from the extension / theme developer. Any license for themes, plugins or any other software purchased by us for use in the building of a customers website remains ours, unless an agreement has been specifically made with a customer. Therefore, upon leaving our hosting and support service customers will need to purchase their own licenses to ensure the website performs as expected and software updates can be obtained.
Where a bug or error is discovered during development we will liaise with the developer for a total of up to 2 hours to rectify the problem and install a bug fix where the developer has provided one. If the developer is unable to provide a fix and another suitable extensions needs to be used there will be an additional charge to remove the original extension and source, install and configure a replacement extension.
If during or after development the CLIENT decides that an extension does not meet their requirements there will be an additional charge to review the client’s requiements, remove the original extension and source, install and configure a replacement extension. This charge will be at our standard hourly rate for the total amount of additional hours required.
35. In the event any one or more of the clauses in these terms and conditions is deemed to be invalid for any reason, the remaining clauses will be unimpaired and the terms and conditions will not be void for this reason alone.