Maintenance Contracts (including hositing)

maintenance contacts, web, hosting, proposals, RFPs

[Zigmund]

Hi I am putting togther a proposal for a site which asks for a maintenance contact, I have seen some examples on previous fourums but does anyone have one including hosting?

Thanks for your help

[JamesR]

Hi Zigmund,

Thanks for posting at WebmasterWorld.

Contractual agreements may be considered proprietary information by many members here.

I would just look around at some hosting services, get a general idea of pricing and features and tack that on to what you already have. Most agreements are just what both parties can live with...they are already your customer so you have an advantage in trust and convenience.

[requiem]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Zigmund!

You will find some SEO conracts at the following URL

onlinewebtraining.com/chat/contracts.html

It wasn't exactly what you was looking for but it might give you an idea.

Good luck.

[Marcia]

Zigmund, there are different issues that come up for SEO and straight design work where maintenance is concerned.

With design (which may or may not be bundled together with hosting arrangements), monthly maintenance generally means just that - upkeep of the original site, checking links and functionality and minor changes - like a bit of text or simple changing of a graphic.

Changing or adding graphics that need a lot of processing to get web-ready, adding additional pages (which sometimes involves modifying the navigation), or major changes on existing pages - or even adding features such as a CMS or CGI forms - those should be billed separately, either by the page, by the feature or by the hour.

The demarcation between maintenance and additional work done with respect to SEO services is not as clear, and is harder to define and explain, since a lot of site owners don't easily grasp certain concepts right away. For example, a site may start out with a company's entire line of products, which is relatively simple, but in some cases what starts as a one-product or few-products site with a limited keyword set can grow over time to include dozens of products with a multiplied number of keywords. The site owner still may see it as "his site" but we know that it isn't the same site at all if that happens. Maintenance for 100 pages/products takes longer than 5 products/pages, and also, if it's necessary to add content pages to rank for certain keywords, will the creation of additional pages be included as part of the maintenance, or will be need to be billed additionally?

Whichever services or whatever the terms, the possibility of change should be anticipated, as well as provision made for modifications of the agreement at some point in time.