Terms and Conditions: Working Together on your Website

If you are planning to work with us, please and read these terms and conditions carefully. We will refer to it as our work progresses. If you’re looking for general website advice, see or Handy Tips page.

What we will do

Applegreen does the technical part of creating, uploading and maintaining websites, from conception to completion.

We suggest designs, and then work with you to achieve a result you like which we think will work for your project. Once we have a draft design, we place it in a sub-folder of Applgreen’s own website so that you can see it and share it with friends. Ultimately we can arrange a domain name and hosting, and place your website online on its own address.

We are not a graphic design company but we can offer graphic design within our capabilities. For complex logos and branding we would refer you to specialist colleagues.

We are not experts in Seach Engine Optimisation (SEO) but we will carry out basic optimisation across your website as a standard part of our work (read more about SEO). There are companies that specialise in SEO, analytics and Google Ads.

We do not have our own Content Management System (CMS) but we can design your website in WordPress, giving you the means to update it yourself. Please make this decision at the start of a project.

We are not marketing experts but we can offer guidance to get you started, and refer you on to colleagues if you wish.

What you need to have thought about

You, rather than we, are the experts in your own field: if you are starting a business we expect you to have thought through some of the implications.

In particular, you will need to know your market and to have understood that you are probably entering a field with many existing players. We expect you to be aware of your closest rivals, to have looked at their websites and to have given some thought to what might be your Unique Selling point (USP).

Do consider the following: how will you bring visitors to your website? How will they discover you? How will you compete with the opposition? What search terms (keywords) would your customers use to find you, and what level of competition is there for these terms? Applegreen are happy to discuss these questions but you need to have done some of your own thinking.

A new website on its own will not be sufficient to launch your business. At some point you will need to deal with the different aspects of marketing and advertising, including the use of social media (read more about social media). The people whose businesses grow are those who put time and effort into its dissemination.

What we need from you

We need to know your style preferences before we launch into a design based on the very colours you hate most. If you have favourite websites, let us know — we won’t be able to match them exactly because that would infringe copyright, but it’ll give us ideas to work on.

On the other hand, don’t be too wedded to a particular design in case turns out to be either technically impossible or inadvisable. What works well in print, say in a book or leaflet, does not necessarily translate to the web. Please be prepared to take advice on this.

The text must come from you. We are happy to improve on exisiting text if you’re not very comfortable with writing, but we must have something to start with and cannot be expected to guess the content of your website.

Images you provide must be of a decent size and quality. We can improve lighting and even orientation if a photo is not completely straight but we can’t deal with blurred images or poor composition, where a main subject is partly off the picture. We believe that poor-quality photography actually detracts from the effectiveness of a design. Consider employing professionals, either specially commissioned or through online image libraries. Talk to us about this.

We will suggest a website structure for your approval, but or course you know your own field better than us. There may be obvious aspects of website design that apply to your area of expertise, and we expect you to have done enough research to be aware of them. We will try to create the best structure and design, but we cannot take responsibility for the long-term success or otherwise of your enterprise.

You need to have planned the time you will spend helping us to build the website, and then publicising it afterwards.

Please give some thought to how disabled users will access your website. Read more on our Accessibility page.

WordPress Websites

WordPress is a third-party platform that allows developers to create websites by customising the look and functionality. It is very powerful and offers a wealth of options, not least the chance for website owners to update their website themselves (content management).

For people learning to use WordPress, our WordPress Instructions can guide you whether or not your design was carried out by us.

WordPress uses ‘themes’ that work like a kind of skin: the theme determines how the website looks, how it works and how easy it is to customise. There is a great variety of themes, some free and some paid. Applegreen prefers to design bespoke themes specially for its clients.

Clients sometimes come to us having made a start in WordPress, installed a theme by themselves, tried to customise it and got into trouble. They have usually done a great deal of work adding content before realising they really need specialist help.

While we’re willing to help, every theme has its limitations and we cannot work miracles where a theme is deficient. We will endeavour to make the design attractive and talk you through adding content and SEO correctly. But we will be limited in what we can achieve if another designer has been involved. Having said that, we have helped a lot of people in this situation and reached reasonable solutions for them.

The WordPress developers ares continually adding functionality, ironing out bugs and fixing security loopholes. We strongly recommend that you update the system, themes and plugins when prompted. This is your responsibility as website owner.

Ecommerce Websites

Ecommerce means selling products through your website. There are several ways to do it:

• With just one or two products to sell at a fixed price, the simplest is to add PayPal buttons. This works well with static websites. Paypal provides the payment interface. A business account with PayPal will enable purchasers to use their credit or debit card if they do not have a PayPal account.
• WordPress websites integrate with the ecommerce plugin WooCommerce, which adds shop, cart and checkout pages and integrates with Paypal. The basic plugin is free and can be made to integrate any bespoke theme. But additonal functionality can be purchased by subscription. This includes a watermark to protect images, a music player for sampling music files, and other additional options
• Shopify is an all-in-one ecommerce platform (non-WordPress) that displays products in many variations and integrates with a choice of payment methods, including a direct link with the seller’s bank account, though PayPal, GPay and ApplePay are all options. Shopify is not free: after the 14-day trial, the seller pays a subscription (currently 29$/month, see pricing plan). If you’re thinking of Shopify, you need to be sure of selling a set amount per month in order to make it work for you. Currently, Applegreen does not create bespoke designs for Shopify but there are plenty of themes that can be customised and personalised.

All selling intermediaries take a commission on sales, but the differences between them may affect your choice. PayPal and Stripe take a commission on each sale, while other providers (SagePay, WorldPay) take a monthly subscription. If you are or not sure how much you are likely to sell, PayPal and Stripe can be good starting points.

Factors to consider with ecommerce

Ecommerce involves a lot of work and is, in our experience, the type of website that most frequently fails. By failure we mean that the website owner loses heart with the complexity of it all. So here are a few things to think about if you really want to make a success of online selling.

• What experience to you have of retail? If you are already successfully selling via online platforms such as Ebay or Etsy, or via a physical shop, you know you have a market and you have a good idea who your customers are. An WordPress or Shopify site extending your range is an obvious next step.
• Who are your competitors? Without knowing who they are, you won’t be able to compete successfully against them — do your research.
• How will you attract customers? Consider your unique selling points, including geography and niche, and make sure you are fulfilling a need.
• Do you have attractive photos of all your products? Online, products without good pictures won’t sell. Consider employing a photographer, or use the images that come from the manufacturer.
• How will you attract visitors to your new website? In a crowded market, just putting products online won’t be enough. Think about how you will reach your customers: craft fairs, shows, local shops, social media and more.
• How comfortable will you be using the online platform we set up for you, based on your previous experience with computers? We will teach you the system but the job of managing products and orders day-to-day will be up to you. If you are a diehard technophobe, an online shop may not be the right thing for you.

An Ecommerce project we refused

Online selling isn’t for everyone. Here is an example of someone I talked out of a website idea with Applegreen (if he approached another designer, I will never know!). A man rang up and described a project he had for his retirement: selling a range of children’s clothes supplied by someone he knew. Probing a little, I found that he had never sold clothes (or anything) before.

In the first instance he wanted me to set up an Ebay shop for him, a service I don’t actually offer. While I had him on the phone I did a quick search of Ebay and another seller of children’s clothes immediately came up. He had never heard of them: he clearly hadn’t looked at Ebay himself.

This customer had done no background research on the competition, either on Ebay or anywhere else online. He had had what he thought was a good idea, and he was looking to Applegreen to fill in the gaps. Our job is to create the online tool to get products displaying and selling online, but we cannot take charge of a project for clients. A marketing expert may do that, but that is a paid service.

Whose job is it to add the content to my website?

Content is the text and images of your website. It is where you explain your organisation, company or products. Content can also be products for sale. You know your business best so you should be the one to drive the substance of your content.

With hand-coded sites, we do not expect our clients to navigate code. We will upload your content as part of the original job of creating the site. After the initial work, we charge for further updates at our usual hourly rate.

If we are providing content management system (CMS), you will be able to add your own content. We create the templates for you to add and display your material, whether it is products, page content and posts.

The prospect of learning WordPress for this purpose can be daunting for some people. We provide instructions and ongoing support tailored to your particular installation and theme. There is also extra information on Applegreen’s own website.

We commit to adding enough text or products to confirm that the display is correct and the system is working. Each separate template will have at least some content added. But you know your business best: we would hate to add products with the wrong price, or give the wrong information about your services.

Encouraging you to add your own content allows you to learn the system under our guidance while handing control of your website’s content.

With complex systems such as ecommerce platforms, we can schedule meetings as needed while you are learning. This way you can work a bit on your own and come back to us with questions, until you are comfortable on your own.

Since the pandemic we have being teaching remotely, which works remarkably well. Zoom enables us to share mouse control so that you get proper hands-on experience, under our guidance.

Consider employing professionals for photography and/or logo design

Poor imagery can let down a good design. Many people baulk at the additional cost of a photographer, especially as everyone takes snaps on their phone nowadays. But we think this is a false economy.

A good photographer understands lighting, positioning, framing and background. Their images will be sharp and attractive, setting off the subject to best advantage. Without wishing to be rude, we think most amateur snaps don’t enhance a website.

A professional photographer will also produce images of the right size for our needs. Many web pages are around 1200 pixels wide, and some stretch to the full desktop monitor width which can be in excess of 2000px. You can’t stretch a 640px-wide picture to create a website banner image. We can add such photos to galleries and product images if they are sharp enough. Banners and backgrounds need much larger images.

Purchasing high-quality stick images from Shutterstock can also be a good option in some circumstances.

Where logos are concerned, we can design something basic. But a professionally designed logo can enhance your brand and inform the whole design. If you go down this route, we will wait to see the results before progressing with our design work. This is to make sure the colours and tone of our work match the designer’s.

We can put you in touch with photographers and graphic designers.

How do we communicate when working together?

I don’t mean the usual communication methods, which of course include phone, email, face-to-face meetings and, these days, Zoom.

What I am concerned with here is the fine detail. Once we get down to filling pages or uploading products for sale, only you know which image belongs where. You know your own material very well whereas we, at our end, do not. What may seem obvious to you will be entirely new to us.

So please, label everything, especially images. Images for upload should have short filenames made up of words (not numbers) in all lower case. There should be hyphens between words and no spaces. Associated information (image location, captions etc) should be clearly listed in a separate document and the images clearly referenced.

Content management systems allow you to add your content into the templates we have created and become independent of us. Involving you with this at an early stage is not laziness on our part: it is a way to avoid costly mistakes and ensure accuracy. Only you can be responsible for the information presented on your website.

Help! I don’t like the design you’ve done!

We want you to be happy with your website. We normally submit two or three related designs before settling on one. Adjustments to colours and positioning and even structure are easy to make early on (read more about design).

In some cases a design really only comes alive once the content has been added, so we counsel patience. As with any purchase, it is natural to experience doubts along the way. Take time to think about it and ask friends and colleagues for their views.

Help! I don’t know what to write!

Some people find this harder than others. We are here to help but we cannot be expected to guess the content for you. Your input is essential for the project to succeed. There are some clues to the most obvious things on our Content page.

After our first meeting we try to work out a page structure (it’s ok if this changes later). Once the design is in place we create a navigation system based on the agreed structure. Use this as a guide to the content that is still needed.

Even so, an empty website can seem daunting and it can take time to find the right voice. We are happy to keep advising; we are also happy to re-write text if you are not confident about writing. We can meet with you and write as you speak, if you find this the easiest method.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you’re having problems. It is easiest for us to help you if you are straight with us about this.

Beware of copyright and licensing pitfalls

Images and fonts are easy to download from the internet. That does not mean you can add them to your website. A licence or permission must be sought appropriate to the font or image’s use. This is usually straighforward, though not necessarily free of charge and must not be overlooked. Licencees have their own terms and conditions to abide by.

Extras from Applegreen

We can provide analytics to track the use of your site by visitors, talk to us about this.

If you wish to integrate a blog or a Twitter feed, please tell us at the start because of the design implications.

Let us advise and help with the creation of a regular email newsletter.

Website analytics and cookies

We can place analytics tracking software on our websites. If you want this, please ask.

The software takes the form of a small piece of code, or cookie, which tracks the behaviour of visitors without identifying them. The aggregated data are presented as charts which provide information about visits to the site. This includes visitor numbers, length of stay, popular pages and exit points. This can help with strategies for improving the site in the future.

The data is collected and processed by Google Analytics (in a few early projects we used StatCounter). Google Analytics works hand in hand with the Search Console which picks up errors such as incorrect page redirects. On one occasion, Google Search Console alerted us to an “injection hack” on one of our websites. This is a type of attack in which a hacker uploades hundreds of unrelated pages without permission. We were able to deal rapidly with this and resubmit the site for indexing.

Although visitors can’t be identified by their IP alone, they should nevertheless be informed that anonymised data is being collected. The place to do this is in your privacy policy (see below). Visitors may opt out of this data collection by using their browser’s incognito mode.

Google Analytics stores data for a set amount of time and then deletes it automatically. Most accounts are set to the default value of 26 months.

If you would like us to add a cookie control script which pops someone visits your site, please ask. Some people hate this so we don’t do it as standard.

Your privacy policy

Every website should carry a privacy policy, saying what your business or organisation does with its data. This may be difficult to formulate for new projects that haven’t worked out what data they will collect. But it’s good to start thinking about it early on. You will need one even if you don’t collect data.

We have published some guidelines on writing a privacy policy. These guidlelines are not exhaustive and cannot serve as a legal documen. For more information your should consult the ICO website and/or a lawyer. You can also read our own privacy policy.

Costs and charges

See our Costs page for an overview. Applegreen does not charge upfront, and does not normally charge for meetings as long as these are reasonable. We usually finish the work and make sure you are happy before sending our bill.

We normally charge as per quote at the end of a project. But extra costs (which are always discussed with you) can be incurred by the following:

• Purchase of domain and hosting: we normally provide a ballpark figure but the final costs are outside our control;
• Purchase of design elements (stock images, fonts, WordPress themes..);
• Regular subscriptions for paid WordPress features;
• Major changes from the original specification, such as the addition of an intergrated blog, or the decision to have a contact form rather than a plain email address;
• Follow-up work such as updates and analytics.

We do not normally ask for a deposit. Projects that take more than six months to progress from the initial design incur a charge which is deductible from the final total.

Hosting and domain costs must be paid within two months of invoicing (unless there is a delay agreed with us). Unpaid invoices risk your website going offline and you may lose it entirely.

We provide follow-up work at £30/hour. .

Enough terms and conditions, let’s do it!

A new website is a partnership between you, the client, and us at Applegreen. We will need your input at every stage so you need to respond when we propose designs and changes.

We also recognise that a website is a big purchase for people starting a new venture. People running a business are busy working much of the time. For that reason we remain flexible with our demands on you.

It’s your website: we will build it, you will make it succeed.

Last updated: November 2022