The Business Side of the Website Designer
and Webmaster
Website Designers and Webmasters Contracts
A contract is a legal and binding document between two parties
that lays out each party’s responsibilities under that contract.
It tells who’s involved, what each will do and their responsibilities
to the other, special considerations, copyrights, confidentiality,
indemnification, termination of contract, limited warranty, governing
law, severability, and force majeure. Once you have all this legal
stuff taken care of, you can then incorporate the content of your
proposal to provide a finished contract. You should always seek
the help of a legal professional when dealing with contracts. You
can also use contracts known to have been created by a legal professional.
Summary
Striking out to be self-employed as a website designer or webmaster
is no easy task. The competition is global, and there are thousands,
even hundreds of thousands, of website designers and webmasters
for prospective customers to chose from. A search at Google for
"website design" yielded a 3,610,000 return on 2/03/2004. To make
matters worse, today’s customers are looking for more than just
web page and site design. They want functional sites that prompt
actions and rank well in search engine search results. The days
of designing a functional aesthetically appealing page with slick
navigational abilities are long gone.
To survive in today’s website designer and webmaster world you
will need to be a hybrid of designer, marketer, and SEO. It won’t
hurt to be knowledgeable in copywriting either. Without knowledge
in the newest technologies coupled with these hybrid talents, you
will gain little work. Without work to sustain your business growth,
you will have no business. Failing to plan will assuredly mean ruin
for your business.
You should formulate a business plan and make careful choices when
it comes to your legal form of business. By knowing where you want
to be in the future, you will have a basis to make the right choice
for your business. Choosing the right legal form of business will
ensure proper shielding for your website designer or webmaster business.
Failure to make the right choice could leave you open to un-needed
liability down the road.
There is a framework you should follow when developing sites for
customers. By following this framework, you will be able to document
customer choices and avoid problems later. By effectively communicating
with your clients you will leave nothing to chance, and improve
the chances that the work you do will be what the customer wanted.
This will pay off in word of mouth advertisement and repeat business.
You will have nice customers and you will have demanding customers.
The ways to deal with each of these types are different.
Before starting any work for a potential customer, you should provide
them with a proposal that outlines what you will do and what you
expect from them. It should be detailed to show the exact things
you will do, and how much it is going to cost the potential customer.
After some negotiation back and forth, it will become time to draw
up a contract. By doing the legwork with the proposal and being
as detailed as possible, you will be able to add the proposal content
to the final contract and save yourself some time. When dealing
with contracts and proposals, you should always seek the help of
a professional legal service.
This article in no way covers all the possible situations, nor
do I attempt to do so. It is well out of the scope of this article.
Should you wish to read in more detail about website designers and
webmaster business, then I would suggest an e-book by Mark Frank,
The Webmasters Business Masters Course. Mark goes more in depth
to the legal sides of the webmaster business, and covers the topics
I mention here in a much more concise and expanded manner. You can
read a review of that free book here,
or you can download
it directly from us here.
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Other Legal Articles:
Related E-Book Downloads
By James R. Sanders
February 3, 2004
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About the Author
James R. Sanders is the owner of Sanders
Consultation Group Plus. He has been a webmaster and website designer since
1997. He has also been involved in self employment ventures since 1992. He is
presently a contributing author of NewbieHangout,
and has been published through WebProNews
and 4Rankings.com.
His writing is targeted to webmasters, would be webmasters, website designers,
would be website designers, self employed, or those researching information
looking for solutions to questions associated with design, business operations,
and promotion today. His goal is to provide practical information based upon
his years of experience to help webmasters, website designers, and self employed
people achieve their goals in today's competitive global market. You can subscribe
to his free newsletters at SCGP
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This page last updated:
Wednesday, October 19, 2005 11:42 AM
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