It’s interesting, I often look at the web-stats and Google Analytics for this site and see the same search phrase time and time again – “website designing terms and conditions” and several variants of this phrase keep on being searched for and the Forest Software site is currently (and has been for a long while now) one of the top results returned by Google.
Today I decided to take a look at the website design terms and conditions page on our site (that we had written by a solicitor for us when we started to create websites back in 1995 – and has been on our current and previous site since 2004, and on sites before that).
So having taken a look at our page I then searched on Google for a random phrase contained in that page “does not undertake to maintain or update a client’s website as part of the design commission. If a client wishes” and as the search shows I came up with over 300 copies of our terms. Now, I don’t mind people basing their terms on ours, even though it cost us money to have them drawn up – what does make me a little mad is that very few of them acknowledge where they got it from – in fact our terms say at the bottom of the page “If you are a web designer and would like to use these terms or base your on them (as we have found lots have) we would appreciate acknowledgement of the fact that they are based on ours – there is no need for a link to our site (unless you want to) but at least a mention of Forest Software would be appreciated – thanks”. So far in my checking I have found about 8 sites that have done so.
Mind you, I have also found several web designers that have just copied our terms verbatim, even leaving in our name or postal address – would you use a designer that can’t carry out basic checks to make sure that they have replaced our name with theirs or blatantly breaches the copyright laws?
As we have said on our page, and I have repeated above, we have no problem with any designer using our T&C but we would appreciate an acknowledgement of the fact (heck – we are not even asking for a link to our site as we understand that a designer may not want to be sending visitors to a competitors site).