Legal
Part A · General terms
These terms govern every engagement between us. By commissioning work, paying an invoice or deposit, or confirming a quote in writing, you accept them, and if you are agreeing on behalf of a business you confirm that you have authority to do so.
Where a written quote, proposal or scope of work conflicts with these terms, the quote takes precedence for that engagement, but only on the specific point of conflict. Everything else in these terms continues to apply.
We may decline any engagement at our discretion.
We provide website design and development, WordPress builds, subscription websites, search engine optimisation, paid advertising management, website and Google Business Profile audits, copywriting and related digital marketing services.
The scope of each engagement is agreed in writing before work begins. Anything not listed in the agreed scope is excluded, and is quoted separately if you want it added.
We will carry out the Services with reasonable skill and care, applying current recognised best practice and the published guidance of the relevant platform.
We will use appropriately experienced people, select the tools we work with on merit rather than being tied to any single vendor, and keep you informed of progress at the intervals set out below.
We will tell you promptly if something material changes, including anything we find that is likely to affect the result, whether or not it falls inside the agreed scope.
These are commitments about how we work. They are not commitments about outcomes, which depend on factors outside our control and are dealt with separately below.
To let us deliver on time and to the agreed standard, you agree to:
Materials you supply should be in a usable, professional format. Where materials need additional work before they can be used, for example recreating a low-resolution logo as a vector file, retyping content supplied on paper, or sourcing replacements for unusable images, that work is chargeable and is quoted before we carry it out.
You warrant that you own, or have permission to use, everything you supply to us, and that our use of it in the agreed way will not infringe anyone else's rights or breach any law.
You agree to indemnify us against any claim, loss, cost or expense we suffer arising from a breach of that warranty, from material you have supplied or approved, or from your use of the Deliverables in a way we did not advise.
We aim to respond to calls, emails and messages by the end of the next working day.
For ongoing SEO and paid advertising services, you receive a written report covering the previous month within the first week of the following month. Reports cover the work carried out and the performance data available from the relevant platforms.
Quotes are provided in writing and are valid for 30 days from the date of issue unless stated otherwise. Prices exclude VAT unless stated otherwise. Work requested outside the agreed scope is quoted separately before it is undertaken, and is never assumed to be included.
Payment terms are confirmed in writing before work begins. Unless agreed otherwise:
Late payments may incur interest and compensation under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998. We may pause work, withhold Deliverables, or suspend hosted services until outstanding invoices are settled. Deliverables remain our property until paid for in full.
Where a payment is reversed, charged back or otherwise recovered after work has been delivered, the sum remains due and we may suspend all services until it is settled.
Because our services involve professional time, expertise and third-party costs that are committed as work progresses, payments are non-refundable, except where:
In particular: deposits are non-refundable once work has commenced; audits are non-refundable once delivered; monthly service fees are non-refundable once the period they cover has begun; where a minimum term has been paid in advance, the whole of that payment is non-refundable, because it buys a committed term rather than a series of separately cancellable months; and third-party costs incurred on your behalf, such as domains, licences, stock assets or advertising spend, are non-refundable in all cases.
If you cancel a project part-way through, the work completed to that point remains chargeable at the proportion of the agreed price that it represents.
Nothing in this section affects any rights you have under law that cannot be excluded.
Our services are aimed at businesses. If you are contracting as a consumer rather than in the course of a business, you have statutory rights that these terms do not affect, including a period of 14 days from the day the contract is made in which you may cancel without giving a reason, under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.
If you would like us to start work during that 14 day period, we will ask you to confirm that in writing first. Where you do:
Nothing in these terms limits your statutory rights as a consumer.
All timescales we give, including launch dates and delivery estimates, are good-faith estimates and not guaranteed deadlines unless expressly agreed in writing as fixed. Timescales depend on you supplying content, feedback, approvals and access promptly, and on third parties such as hosting companies, domain registrars and advertising platforms performing normally.
Delays caused by late materials, late feedback, scope changes or third parties extend the timescale accordingly and do not constitute a breach by us. Where an offer advertises a specific build time, that clock starts when we have everything we need from you and pauses whenever we are waiting on you.
Where you ask us to compress an agreed schedule, or your delays require us to reschedule other work, we may charge an additional fee for the expedited or rescheduled work, quoted and agreed in writing before we proceed.
If a project is held up waiting on materials, feedback or approvals from you for more than 30 days, we may invoice for the work completed to that point and treat the project as paused. Restarting a paused project is subject to our availability at that time.
Unless the project agreement states otherwise, project work includes up to two rounds of revisions per deliverable within the agreed scope. Further revisions, or changes requested after your final written approval, are new work and are quoted separately. Approval given by email or message counts as written approval.
On receipt of full payment, ownership of the final agreed Deliverables transfers to you. Until full payment is received, all work remains our intellectual property and may not be used, copied or published.
We retain ownership of any tools, frameworks, code libraries, templates and know-how we bring to the engagement or develop generally, and of anything not specific to your business. Where these are embedded in a Deliverable, you receive a perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use them as part of that Deliverable.
We retain the right to display completed work in our portfolio and marketing, and to place a discreet credit link in the footer of websites we build, unless agreed otherwise in writing.
Third-party assets such as fonts, plugins, stock images and licences remain subject to their own licence terms, which may be personal to you and may carry ongoing costs.
Much of our work depends on platforms and services operated by third parties, including search engines, advertising platforms, hosting providers, domain registrars and analytics and reporting tools.
Any figures we quote in proposals, case studies or marketing, such as traffic increases or enquiry volumes, describe past results for other clients and are illustrative only. They are not a promise of equivalent results for you.
No employee, subcontractor or representative of ours is authorised to give a guarantee of ranking, traffic, enquiry volume or revenue, and any such statement is of no effect unless confirmed by us in writing as a specific contractual commitment.
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. Subject to that:
You accept that these limits are reasonable given the nature of the services and the fees charged, and that you are able to insure against the risks they leave with you.
Both parties agree to keep confidential any non-public business information shared during an engagement, and to use it only for the purposes of the work. This obligation survives the end of the engagement.
We process personal data in accordance with UK data protection law, including the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. What we collect about you and why is set out in our privacy policy.
Where we process personal data on your behalf, for example enquiries submitted through your website or contact data held in an advertising account, you are the controller and we act as processor. In that role we will:
During an engagement and for 12 months afterwards, neither party will solicit or employ the other's staff or subcontractors who have been directly involved in the work, without the other's written consent. This does not prevent either party from responding to a general recruitment advertisement not targeted at those individuals.
If something is not right, tell us. Raise it in writing to sam@cribbarcreative.co.uk with enough detail for us to look into it, and we will acknowledge it within two working days and give you a substantive response within ten working days.
We would rather fix a problem than argue about it, and both parties agree to attempt to resolve any dispute in good faith before starting legal proceedings.
Either party may end an engagement by written notice: 30 days for monthly services, or as stated in the specific offer terms for subscription websites. On termination, all work completed up to the end of the notice period remains payable, and any unpaid invoices become immediately due.
We may terminate immediately if invoices remain unpaid after reasonable reminders, if you materially breach these terms, or if you become insolvent.
On termination, once all sums due have been paid, we will provide a final summary of work carried out and hand over the account access and credentials that are yours to hold. Sections that by their nature should survive termination, including intellectual property, confidentiality, data protection, limitation of liability and non-solicitation, continue to apply.
Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including illness, power or network failures, or third-party outages. Timescales are extended by the duration of the event. Where such an event continues for more than 60 days, either party may end the affected engagement by written notice.
We act as an independent supplier. Nothing in these terms makes either party the employee, agent, partner or joint venturer of the other, and we have no authority to enter into commitments on your behalf unless you have expressly authorised us to do so in writing, for example to manage an advertising account.
Where we are given access to your systems or premises, we will comply with your reasonable security and access requirements.
These terms, together with the written quote or proposal for your engagement, form the entire agreement between us and replace any earlier discussion, proposal or representation. Neither party has relied on any statement not recorded in writing. This does not limit liability for fraudulent misrepresentation.
Any change to these terms, or to an agreed scope of work, takes effect only once confirmed in writing by both of us.
We may use carefully selected subcontractors or specialist suppliers to carry out part of an engagement. Where we do, we remain responsible to you for that work and for the confidentiality obligations set out above.
Neither party may transfer its rights or obligations under these terms to anyone else without the other's written consent, except that we may assign them to a successor of our business.
Formal notices under these terms, including notice to end an engagement, must be given in writing by email to sam@cribbarcreative.co.uk, or to the email address we hold for you, and are treated as received on the next working day after they are sent.
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.
We may update these terms from time to time. The version published on this page at the time you commission work is the version that applies to that work.
Part B · Service-specific terms
These sections apply in addition to Part A, for the services they name.
Each build is quoted against a written scope covering the pages, features and functionality included. Anything outside that scope is new work and is quoted separately.
Our subscription website offer is governed by the terms stated on the 7-day websites page at the time of sign-up, including the three-month minimum term paid up front, the monthly fee thereafter, one month's notice to cancel, and the one-off transfer fee if you choose to buy the site outright.
We carry out SEO with reasonable skill and care, applying current best practice and working within the published guidelines of the search engines, principally Google Search Essentials.
We do not use paid link schemes, private blog networks, cloaking, doorway pages, hidden text, scraped or automatically spun content, or any other technique that carries a risk of a manual action or algorithmic penalty. Where we find that a previous supplier has used methods of this kind, we will tell you and recommend how to put it right.
Our work draws on a range of established industry tools for keyword research, technical crawling, rank tracking, backlink analysis and competitor benchmarking, together with the search engines' own data through Google Search Console, Google Business Profile and your analytics platform where access is granted. Tools are selected on merit and reviewed as the market changes.
Search rankings are determined by third parties, principally Google, whose algorithms change without notice and are outside anyone's control. Our obligation is to carry out the work to a professional standard, not to achieve a particular position. Accordingly:
SEO is an ongoing discipline, not a one-off fix. A single audit, or a single month of work, will identify and correct a great deal, but visibility in search is built and then held over time. Search engines favour websites that stay current, publish genuinely useful content and continue to earn relevance in their market, so the work compounds when it is sustained and erodes when it stops.
Part of what we deliver is a clear, prioritised plan of what needs doing, including the actions that sit with you rather than with us. Where an action is yours to take, we will set out what it is, why it matters and where it sits in the order of priority, and we will keep raising it for as long as it stays outstanding. If you would rather we took any of it on, we will quote for it.
Where recommendations are not actioned, or the website is left without new or updated content for long periods, results will be limited accordingly and that is outside our control. The most common examples are:
None of this affects the fees due for work already carried out, and none of it prevents us continuing with the parts of the plan that are within our control.
Where we take on an existing website, results can be limited by circumstances pre-dating our involvement, including:
Where we identify anything of this kind we will tell you and recommend a fix. Remedial work of this nature falls outside standard SEO services and is quoted separately, as is design or development work that does not directly serve the SEO scope.
Website audits and Google Business Profile audits are one-off, deliverable-based services. The deliverable is a written report of findings, prioritised recommendations and supporting evidence.
Audits are carried out with reasonable skill and care, applying current recognised best practice and the published guidance of the relevant platform, including Google Search Essentials and the Google Business Profile guidelines.
Each audit combines structured manual review with data drawn from a range of established industry tools covering technical crawling, performance measurement, search visibility, local search signals and analytics, alongside the search engines' own data where you have granted us access.
The scope of each audit is confirmed in writing before work begins, and we will tell you what is and is not covered. Where we identify something outside the agreed scope that we believe is materially affecting your results, we will flag it, whether or not it forms part of the engagement.
Each report is prepared for your business and for your internal use. You are free to act on it, share it with your own advisers and give it to another supplier to implement. It may not be resold, published or presented as another party's work without our written consent.
Hosting and care plans are provided using reputable third-party infrastructure. We target high availability but, as with all hosting, cannot guarantee uninterrupted service and are not liable for downtime caused by third-party providers.
Questions about these terms: sam@cribbarcreative.co.uk, or write to Cribbar Creative, Newquay, Cornwall.