Terms of Service
The terms that apply to work performed by Oogle, and to the use of this website.
These terms describe how Oogle works. They are general information rather than legal advice, and where a written agreement exists for a specific engagement, that agreement governs.
Using this website
The content of this website is provided for information. It is written carefully and in good faith, and it is general information rather than advice about your specific situation. Acting on it is at your own discretion.
Quotes and estimates
Work is agreed before it starts. Hourly work is billed for the time it takes, at the rate quoted to you in writing before the work begins. Project work is quoted against a written scope. Where something outside that scope becomes necessary, we tell you before doing it rather than afterwards.
Two services are sold as monthly plans with a published price rather than quoted individually: Website Care and Website Design. Both are described below. Everything else is scoped and quoted.
Monthly plans
Website Care is $199 a month. It covers managed hosting and a content delivery network, updates to the site’s software, security hardening, malware scanning, a web application firewall, off-site backups, performance work, and two Quick Fixes each month. A Quick Fix is a small change of about fifteen minutes or less. Quick Fixes do not roll over from one month to the next and are not development time.
Where a site under Website Care is compromised during the period it is covered, cleanup and recovery are included. That does not extend to a compromise that already existed when the site was taken on, and it is not a warranty that a site will not be compromised. See “What we do not warrant” below.
Website Design starts at $499 a month. It covers building the website and then keeping it running, and it includes everything Website Care includes, with one difference: three hours of development work each month in place of Care’s two Quick Fixes. It also covers onsite search optimization. Ownership is set out under Ownership below.
Both plans are billed monthly. There is no long-term contract on either, and either can be stopped at any time; stopping ends the service, including the hosting, content delivery network and security services it includes, at the end of the period already paid for. These terms apply to both plans for as long as the service runs, and Website Design carries one further condition, set out under Ownership below. Work beyond what a plan includes is quoted before it starts, and plan clients are charged preferred rates for it.
What either plan covers in a particular month, and what falls outside it, is described on that plan’s own page and in the agreement for the engagement.
Payment terms
Invoicing schedule, payment period and any deposit for project work are set out in the written agreement for each engagement, and are agreed before work starts. You will not receive an invoice for anything you did not agree to first.
Your responsibilities
- Providing accurate information about the systems involved
- Providing or arranging the access needed to do the work
- Confirming that you have the right to authorize work on the website and accounts concerned
- Reviewing and responding to work within a reasonable period so a project can proceed
Ownership
On work billed as a project, with a written scope and an invoice, you own what was produced for you once it is paid for: the code, the content, the design and the data. Third party software used in a project remains under its own license, and open source components remain under theirs.
Website Design works differently. The plan exists so that a business can have a website built without a large payment at the start, and the monthly payment buys the service rather than the site. After 12 monthly service payments the client owns the website design outright, and from that point may stay on the plan, move to a Website Care plan, or take the website to a different provider. Before those 12 payments have been made, stopping the service ends the service; it does not transfer the website. There is no long-term contract either way, and this condition is stated on the Website Design page and on the pricing page before anyone signs up.
Your own material is yours throughout, on every arrangement: your text, your images, your logo, and your customer, enquiry and order data. We will provide a copy of it on request, whether or not the website itself has transferred.
Domain names registered on your behalf are registered in your name, and you may request the credentials to them at any time. Hosting is different: where hosting is included in a monthly plan, the site runs on infrastructure we operate and there is no separate hosting account in your name to hand over. Where a hosting account is opened for you separately, it is in your name and the credentials are yours on request.
Where a specific engagement is structured differently from anything described here, the terms set out in the agreement for that engagement govern.
Material you supply
Text, images, logos, fonts, video and anything else you give us to publish has to be yours to use, or licensed to you for that use. We will ask if something looks like it might not be, but we cannot verify it for you, and we rely on your confirmation that it is.
Backups and data
Where Oogle provides backups as part of a plan or an engagement, they are kept off the server that holds the site and are tested. Backups are not a substitute for your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose, and you should keep your own where the data is critical. Where a plan includes security services, those services reduce risk. They do not remove it, and nothing in them is a warranty against compromise.
What we do not warrant
Software, hosting and third party services can fail. We will not warrant uninterrupted availability, that a website will never be compromised, or any particular search ranking, traffic level or business outcome, because none of those are within any provider’s control. What we do commit to is competent work and honest reporting of what happened.
Limitation of liability
Any limitation of liability that applies to a specific engagement is set out in the written agreement for that engagement.
Ending an engagement
Ongoing engagements can be ended by either party, on the notice stated in the written agreement for that engagement. Monthly plans can be stopped at any time and there is no long-term contract on either of them. On Website Design, the release condition set out under Ownership above continues to apply.
When work you own comes to an end, we provide access, files and a reasonable handover to whoever is taking over. We will not hold a website, a domain or a hosting account hostage to a billing dispute. That is about billing disputes, and it does not set aside the Website Design release condition, which is a published term of that plan.
Where a Website Design site has not yet been released, ending the service ends the service: we will give you your own content and data, and your domain, and the website itself transfers once the 12 monthly payments have been made.
Changes to these terms
These terms can change as the services change, and the date above moves when they do. A change here does not alter the written agreement for an engagement already under way.
Governing law
The governing law and venue that apply to an engagement are set out in the written agreement for that engagement.