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:
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- The 5 Pillar Program
- Affiliate Mastery
- Make Your Price Sell
- Make Your Net Auctions Sell Masters Course
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- WAHM it! Make Your Content PREsell
- The Webmasters Business Masters Course
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 has been published through WebProNews. 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 on any page of his site. If you like SCGP content and would like to use it on your site, then check out our content agreement and terms of use. Use our articles on your site without the hassles of writing your own content. Get back to the things you could use your time better for, like site promotion.
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This page last updated — Friday, January 21, 2011 6:46 AMST
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Thinking About an Affiliation with Profit Being You
There hasn't been an update in a while here at SCGP, and we're about to start fixing that with a site redesign as well. While surfing around investigating some of our most recent endeavors, we've run into a website that specializes in people that wish to make a living with a blog, specifically word press, and the ways to set it up and monetize it. It's still in start-up, but being Kimberfly Castleberry, more on her in the following paragraph, is the heart and brains behind this, we feel confident in mentioning this start-up for the benefits we're sure it could offer some of our members. So drop by and sign up, then tell Kim hello at Profit Being You.
And While Thinking About an Affiliation with Profit Being You, it Brings us to Just Ask Kim as Well
We stumbled on Just Ask Kim around the same time, and this too is a site related to Wordpress blogging. However, the slight differences here is that Kim tends to focus more on the plugins and innerworkings of setting up your blogging software for maximum results, including some of the best plugins for SEO, traffic funneling and generation, and some other things as well. So, if you're a Wordpress blogger or thinkig about being one, Kim can definitely help you get started out the right way in your work from home business venture. Drop by Just Ask Kim and learn just what it takes to set up your Wordpress blog for maximum returns.
Site of the Week
This week's site ( yeah, we know, clickfire stayed up a bit longer than a week, we might need to make this a MONTHLY site :o) ) is brought to you courtesy of Sean's Web Design Help Pages.
Sean's site offers some tools, some tutorials, and also some stuff on web accessibility. He's even published an interview with Jakob Neilsen, a reported usability expert. He also has a case study he published on Tesco's accessible website, a company that reportedly brings in £13m a year.
He tosses in some software tools and rounds the site out with some 3D text and design stuff. Drop by and take a look.
About our Link Quality.
As with all of our links, they are all scrutinized heavily to ensure quality and deliverability to our visitors. Should you have ANY problems with ANY links on our pages, should any of the linked companies treat you badly or poorly, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do send us an email and let us know. All such mail should be sent to Poor Links so we might investigate and address issues promptly to keep our member community protected. Lastly but not least, we have also updated our partner's page. You'll actually find links to our partners now with descriptions of how they help Sanders Consultation Group Plus. Thanks for visiting Sanders Consultation Group Plus, keep checking back for frequent updates.
Search Engine Positioning Part IV and V
We have two new articles on search engine positioning now available. These articles look into link popularity and link relevancy, and then we show you how to use them to leverage your search engine positioning. The articles are VERY similar, and they should be, both go hand in hand with each other. We also added an article on the business side of the website design business. Look at what's needed to start your own website design business.
The PREsell concept
Wondering what the PREsell concept is and how it relates to your marketing efforts? Read this article and we'll outline it for you and tell you how to implement the PREsell concept to leverage your marketing efforts.
Other Articles Here at SCGP
Take a look at how the CANSPAM Act of 2003 will affect our marketing efforts, or look into Affiliate Strategy and ways to leverage your affiliate marketing efforts. You could also take a look into the personal side of a webmaster's life and read about time management for webmasters. You can find these articles in our webmasters resource area.
Affiliation With The Web Master's Den
We have added yet another resource to help out our would be webmasters. The Web Master's Den is another resource site with links to information for today's webmasters. Once you have looked into all of our resources, drop by and check out theirs.
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