Yes You Need A Good Contract

5 April 2000

Hello folks. Now that my Dad/lawyer and I have rewritten my contract for the umpteenth time, I think it's finally in a great state to share with all of you. Please feel free to use whatever you want from it in your contract. And yes, you need a contract. No matter what you do out of love :) it's still good to have something countersigned on actual paper just in case. Your worst enemy is actually not your client but a vague contract or no contract at all. Nothing can bite you in the ass like that.

Firstly, go to my contract page and download the current version. It's a PDF so you may want to print it out. And note that if you're reading this much after early April 2000, I may have changed it since.

Now let's look at some of the more important or interesting clauses we have in here.

Section 1a
Here we define that the contracted work will be laid out in section 1d but that we recognise that things come up during the project. We call these "options" or "overage," and this assures that neither I nor my staff are working for free. Options are add-on features or tasks, such as "logo design" or "online auctions" that the client may or may not want. Overage is that annoying extra work you sometimes get because the client changes his or her mind, text, or graphics and expects you to just keep redoing the same thing over and over for free. No no no. :) You want your contract to say the same kind of thing, even if you don't like my nomenclature, because you absolutely do not want to be stuck with a vague contract. You want them to know up front you are charging for anything over and above what you are contracting to do.

Section 1d
This is the section where I put in detail exactly what we are contracting to do and any options we've already priced out. Since technologies and minds change, we also lay out very clearly here what languages we are using, what it is designed to be compatible with, what server software we're using, and the like. This saves us from someone thinking that moving a site from UNIX to NT is free or even moving from one NT server to another is free. The paragraph after that details what file formats we require and states that anything outside of those may incur extra cost. That saves you from those lovely clients who send you Quark Express documents when you need text in Word and graphics separately and think that your time to extract what you need is free. It also assures the client that if they give you exacty what you need how you need it, there won't be any surprise charges.

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