Blink Designworks Guide to Development Contracts

Before you get too far into your Web project, you're going to have to deal with the task of developing contracts. (you weren't even thinking about allowing someone to build a site for you without contracts, right?) One of the main advantages of working with contracts is that in addition to defining everyone's rights and responsibilities, the contract provides written reassurance that everyone is pulling on the same end of the rope from the beginning of the project. Besides the obvious things that the developer is going to want to talk about, (like getting paid), there are a number of points that you should be looking for as the client. Here are a few of them...

Who owns the rights to the finished work?

I've talked to more than one client who, after having a disagreement with his developer, was somewhat flabbergasted to discover that he didn't own the rights to his own site. This most often happens in situations where the developer is the same person who will be hosting your site. Before signing the contract, make sure that all appropriate rights to the work will be transfered to you once the site is delivered and paid for. Otherwise, If you decide that you hate the host for one reason or another... slow servers, too much downtime, billing problems, whatever, you may discover that moving the site entails building it from scratch.

Is the scope of the site clearly spelled out in the contract?

Make sure that everything that you've decided on in your meetings is clearly spelled out in the contracts. What are the site goals? What are the main sections? Who's responsible for content? If your site involves Web integration with legacy systems, who's going to write and test the middleware? Are the compatibility baselines clearly defined? How about guidelines for naming conventions?... Navigational elements? ...Preparation of graphics?... Meta Tags? Much of the detail here will come directly from the feedback that you gave to your developer in the profiler. (You did fill out a project profiler, didn't you?)

Do you have a well-defined delivery date?

Your developers are naturally going to depend on you for timely feedback, decisions, and materials they will need to finish the site. Given that you are supplying them with what they need, they should be able to give you a realistic delivery date. What happens if they miss it? Make sure that you have a well defined disaster plan, and that everybody is in agreement with it, before you proceed. Waiting to work out the details of what to do if the project gets sidetracked can lead to long, expensive delays

Promotion

Promotion is often overlooked when smaller sites are launched. Your developer should be able to help you get started by registering with at least 25 of the major search engines. Although it's time consuming, submissions should be custom-tailored to the site to which you are submitting. There are hundreds of search engines, and they all have their own rules about what they expect from you in the way of content and format before they'll actually list your site, which is why the so-called "automated" search engine submission services ( "we'll submit your site to all the search engines for only $250.00" ) are often a complete waste of money and valuable time.

While there is obviously a lot more to it than we have time to talk about here, (our development contracts, which include a detailed specification sheet, are often over ten pages long.) we can assure you that making the effort to spell out the details in your contract is time well spent and will help protect your project.