Your Terms of Service

what changes have you had to make.

[southarkwright]

I’ve run into a few problems over the last few years with my web design business. Generally the majority of it has been terms or situations that were not covered in my design contracts and things I had never thought of. Just recently I wrote a document, had it looked over by lawyer and sent it to all customers outlining the changes in my terms of service.

My question to everyone is in your experiences, what changes have you had to make in your TOS because of situations not covered or accounted for.

[johntabita]

The two biggest things most people neglect to cover are [1] how many design revisions they'll allow a client to make, [2] payment terms, and [3] who owns the website.

Design Revisions
You can easily trapped into making endless revisions to a design because you didn't specify a limit.

Payment Terms
You can also find yourself not getting paid because you foolishly attached a payment to a production milestone. If you can't complete the milestone because of something the client failed to do (such as provide content), you're left awaiting payment and there's nothing you can do.

Copyright
The other sticky issue is who owns the website and source files. This usually becomes a problem if the client discovers (after the fact) that the website does not belong to him.

There are a host of others that I've not had a problem with, but are in my contract. A couple that come to mind are, not being responsible if the client loses revenue due to interruption of hosting service; the right to shut down the site in the event of delinquent payment; and the right to remove any copyrighted material he puts on the site, if the owner of that copyrighted material files a compliant with me (which you're required to do under the terms of the DMCA).

Like I said, I've never had to do any of these things, but you still need to CYA.