Terms and conditions.

1. Who we are

Coullweb is a fully managed website service run by Coullweb Ltd, registered in England (company number 09914691, VAT number 229 426 596). Our studio is at 16/16a Hart House, Priestley Road, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG24 9PU, United Kingdom.

In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean Coullweb Ltd. "You" and "your" mean the business that takes out the service.

Our services are for businesses only, not consumers. Sole traders, partnerships, charities and other organisations all count as businesses.

2. About these terms

These terms cover everything we offer: the monthly managed plan, care plans, one-off signature projects and our other services.

Which parts apply to you

We look after very different sites, from small business websites to large sites on dedicated support contracts. Which parts of these terms apply depends on the service you have:

• Managed website plan (one monthly price for a site we build and host): sections 3 and 4 apply.
• Maintenance and support contracts (larger sites, with fees and scope agreed with you): your order form sets out what your monthly fee covers, your monthly allowance, any minimum term or notice period, and who owns the site. Sections 3 and 4 don't apply. Section 21 covers how the work runs.
• Signature projects (one-off design and build work): section 5 applies.

Sections 6 onwards apply to every service, unless your order form says otherwise. Where a section applies only to one service, it says so.

Order forms

For some services we agree an order form with you. It sets out the services, the fees and anything specific to your site. Your order form and these terms together make up our agreement. If they conflict, the order form wins. Every maintenance and support contract has an order form.

Which version applies

Each version of these terms has a number and a date. Your agreement follows the version in force when you signed up or signed your order form, until we move you to a new version under section 22. Section 22 explains how we change these terms.

3. Your managed website plan

On the managed website plan, one monthly price covers the lot: design, hosting, security and all standard changes. There's no site builder to learn: you tell us what you need and we make the change for you.

• Design and build of your site, mobile first.
• Hosting, security, backups and software updates.
• All standard changes, most of them live the same working day you ask.
• The same small UK team looking after your site month after month.

Your plan is a service, not a one-off purchase. While you're a customer we keep your site online, up to date and looked after. Larger pieces of work, such as a second site or a bespoke feature, may be quoted separately before we start.

If you're on a maintenance and support contract, your order form sets out what your monthly fee covers instead (see section 2).

4. Changes on the managed plan

On the managed website plan, standard changes are included in your monthly price. That covers the everyday edits a small business site needs: text, images, new pages, prices, opening hours, contact details and the like.

Some work sits outside the plan. We'll always tell you before we start, and either agree it as an add-on or quote for it:

• A full redesign or rebuild of the site.
• Bespoke features or custom development.
• Work on systems we didn't build, such as a separate booking tool or third-party platform.
• Content we're asked to write or research from scratch, rather than edit.

We determine what counts as a standard change and what counts as new or bespoke development. We use changes fairly and in good faith on both sides.

On a maintenance and support contract, changes come out of the monthly allowance in your order form (see section 21).

5. Signature work

Alongside the monthly service we still take on signature projects: bespoke, one-off design and build work quoted on its own terms. This section covers that work, not the monthly plan.

Quotes

We'll send a written proposal before we start. Quotes and proposals are valid for 30 days. If the brief changes, or work is delayed or added, the final cost may change; we'll agree any change with you in writing before we carry it out.

Payment

• A 50% deposit gets the project underway, with the balance due on completion or launch.
• Deposits are non-refundable. Work starts once payment has cleared.
• Work agreed outside business hours or at short notice may be charged at an overtime rate, agreed in advance.

Ownership

Once a project is paid in full, the finished site is yours: its design, code and content. Until then, everything we've produced stays ours.

• We keep ownership of our own framework, components and tools, which we use across projects. You get a permanent licence to use them as part of your site.
• We may show the finished work in our portfolio (see section 13).
• Third-party themes, plugins and fonts stay under their own licences.

If a project stalls or is cancelled

If a project is cancelled, or stalls for three months or more, we'll invoice for the work done up to that point and release it within 30 days. Payments made up to that point are non-refundable.

6. Payment and billing

This section covers the monthly service. Your monthly fee is billed in advance by the payment method you set up. We'll confirm the price in writing before the service starts. All our prices exclude VAT, which we add at the current rate.

• Billing runs in rolling 30-day periods and rolls on until you cancel. There's no minimum term and no notice period, unless your order form sets one.
• Where we invoice you rather than take payment automatically, each invoice is due within 14 days of its date.
• Any work agreed outside the plan is billed separately, and we'll tell you the cost before we begin.
• Business hours are 10:00 to 18:00, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays, unless we agree otherwise in writing.

If a payment fails or an invoice goes unpaid, we'll get in touch before anything changes on your site. If it stays unpaid, we may pause work, then suspend the site after giving you 7 days' written notice. We may also claim interest and fixed compensation under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, with interest at 8% a year above the Bank of England base rate until paid in full.

7. Price changes

We may change the monthly price from time to time. If we do, we'll tell you in writing at least 30 days before it takes effect.

If a new price doesn't work for you, you can cancel before it starts (see section 19). Carrying on after the change takes effect counts as accepting it.

8. Design and approvals

We accept concept and design approval by email and written communication. Design changes must be made in writing.

Once designs, concepts or alterations are approved, reworking them afterwards may count as a new change rather than part of the same one.

9. Support and warranty

Support for the site we build and host is part of your monthly service. You don't buy support hours separately while you're on the plan.

What's covered

• Error messages or system errors reported by you or your users.
• Broken links that are reported.
• Bugs and errors in work we built.
• Help using your site's content management or ecommerce tools.
• Functionality not working as we agreed.

What's excluded

• Bugs caused by changes a third party or you made to our code.
• Faults in systems we didn't build or don't host.
• Problems caused by incorrect content you supplied or approved.

10. Service levels and maintenance

We host your site on managed infrastructure and keep it patched, backed up and secure. Support runs during our business hours (see section 6). Email us at support@coullweb.com, and for a critical problem phone us too.

How quickly we respond

These response times apply if you're on the managed website plan, or on a care plan or contract that includes our hosting, security and maintenance. For anything else, such as a site we don't host, we respond on a best-efforts basis during business hours.

We set each issue's priority with you. "Respond" means a person has picked up the issue and started work on it. Fix times are targets, not guarantees.

• Critical (site down, forms not sending, a security breach): we respond within 2 business hours and aim to fix it the same working day.
• High (a key feature broken, with no workaround): we respond within 4 business hours and aim to fix it within 2 working days.
• Normal (a minor bug, or a fault with a workaround): we respond within 2 working days and aim to fix it within 5 working days.
• Standard changes: most are live the same working day you ask (see section 3), and we respond within 2 working days at the latest.

Our monitoring alerts us automatically if your site goes down. Outside business hours we respond on a best-efforts basis.

Uptime

If you're on one of the plans above, we aim for 99.9% uptime in each calendar month. That's a target, not a guarantee, and service credits apply only where your order form includes them, on the terms it sets out.

No host can promise perfect uptime, and we don't guarantee the availability of the cloud providers we build on. Planned maintenance we've told you about, urgent security work and outages at those providers don't count as downtime.

Maintenance

Where we can, we carry out maintenance quietly and out of hours. If planned work will take your site offline for more than 15 minutes, we'll give you at least 48 hours' notice. Urgent security work may happen at any time. Scheduled maintenance, emergency work and events outside our control aren't treated as downtime.

11. Hosting, domains and email

Hosting is included in your monthly service and provided through independent hosting companies.

• Domain names we buy on your behalf are legally owned by you. While you're on the plan we'll manage renewals for you as part of the service.
• We keep the passwords and account details needed to run your hosting in a secure portal, and share them with you securely on request.
• We can set up web servers, email accounts and platforms for you. While you're a customer we look after them; the underlying accounts remain yours.

Hosting is subject to fair use. It's sized for a typical business website, so if your site regularly uses far more storage, bandwidth or server resources than that, or sends bulk email from our servers, we'll talk to you about moving to a larger hosting package at an extra cost. If a sudden spike in use puts the server or other sites at risk, we may limit it temporarily while we sort it out with you.

12. Your content and acceptable use

You're responsible for the words, images and other material you ask us to publish. By sending us content, you confirm you own it or have the right to use it, and that it doesn't infringe anyone else's rights.

We won't publish anything unlawful, and we may decline a request that would put your site or ours at risk. If a claim is made against us because of content you supplied, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it.

13. Ownership and licence

Your content stays yours. It always has and always will.

Who owns the site itself depends on how it was paid for, whichever care plan it's on now:

• Signature projects: once paid in full, the finished site is yours (see section 5).
• Managed website plan: the design and code we produce remain our intellectual property. You have a licence to use your site for its intended purpose for as long as you're a customer, and it ends when your service ends. The monthly service is a licence to use the site, not a purchase of it.

On the managed plan, you can't sell, copy or hand our code to a third party, or use it outside its original site, without our written permission. If you'd like to keep the site itself, we'll quote a one-off fee to transfer it to you.

We may show your finished site in our portfolio and use it to promote our work. Where your order form says otherwise, it applies instead. Third-party themes, plugins and fonts stay under their own licences.

14. Search engines

While we work to give your site the best possible chance in search, we don't guarantee, and can't be held responsible for, any specific placement or ranking within search engines.

15. Third-party services

Some sites rely on third-party services, such as a payment gateway or booking tool. You're ultimately responsible for those services, and we'll get your permission before setting any up or acting on your behalf.

16. Other services and add-ons

Alongside your website we offer other services, such as SEO, content strategy, conversion rate optimisation, CRM and marketing automation, and the Friction Audit. Each is quoted separately from your monthly website plan or set out in your order form, and these terms apply to it.

It's your responsibility to make sure the information you give us to use in any marketing is correct. Changes to marketing material once approved may incur extra charges.

17. Liability

We take real care with your site, but we can't be responsible for losses outside our reasonable control, such as issues with third-party tools, your own hardware, or decisions you make about your business.

We aren't liable for financial, performance-related or other losses connected with sales, third-party services, tax setup or advice you choose to act on. Where you supply us with materials or products, you do so at your own risk.

Neither of us is liable to the other for loss of profit, revenue, business or goodwill, or for any indirect or consequential loss. Our total liability to you in any 12-month period, however it arises, is limited to the greater of £5,000 or the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event that led to the claim. If data on your site is lost or damaged, our responsibility is to restore it from the most recent backup.

Nothing in these terms limits any liability that can't be limited by law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

18. Data protection

Now and then we may need to gather confidential or sensitive information from you to do our work. Anything we gather or share is held securely and never passed to a third party without your permission.

We handle personal data in line with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. You can ask us in writing to correct or update information we hold. Full detail of how we use personal data lives in our privacy policy.

When we handle data for you

When we host your site or run its forms and analytics, we handle personal data about your customers and visitors on your behalf. That's usually names, contact details, enquiry messages and visitor analytics, for as long as we provide the service. For that data you are the controller and we are your processor. We will:

• use it only to provide our services, and only on your documented instructions;
• make sure everyone who handles it is bound by confidentiality;
• keep it secure with appropriate technical and organisational measures;
• use only sub-processors bound by the same duties, such as our hosting and security providers, and tell you before adding or replacing one so you can object;
• transfer it outside the UK only with the safeguards UK law requires;
• help you respond to people exercising their data rights, and help with security, breach reporting and data protection impact assessments;
• tell you within 48 hours of becoming aware of a personal data breach affecting your data;
• delete or return the data when our service ends, unless the law requires us to keep it;
• give you the information you reasonably need to show compliance, and allow reasonable audits.

You're responsible for having a lawful basis to collect the data, and for your site's privacy notice. You're also responsible for meeting the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR), as amended. That means getting visitors' consent for any non-essential cookies or similar tracking on your site, and having consent (or a valid soft opt-in) for any marketing emails or texts we send for you. We'll set up cookie banners and consent tools as you instruct, and we won't send marketing to anyone you tell us hasn't agreed to receive it.

19. Cancelling your service

You can cancel at any time by letting us know in writing. You don't need to give notice: your service runs to the end of the 30-day period you've paid for, and we won't take another payment after that. There's no exit fee. If your order form sets a minimum term or notice period, that applies instead.

• When your service ends, so does your licence to the site (see section 13), and we'll take it offline, unless you own the site. If you'd rather keep it, ask us for a quote to transfer it to you before your service ends.
• Monthly fees already paid are non-refundable, since they cover the service you've had that month, except under our money-back guarantee below.
• We may also end the service if fees stay unpaid, or if the site is used for unlawful or abusive purposes.
• Either of us can end the service straight away if the other seriously breaks these terms and doesn't put it right within 14 days of being asked, or becomes insolvent.

Money-back guarantee

If you're not happy within the first 30 days of your first monthly service with us, tell us in writing and we'll refund the monthly fees you've paid for it. The service then ends as if you'd cancelled: on the managed website plan, that means your site comes offline.

The guarantee applies once, to the first monthly service you take out with us. It doesn't cover signature project deposits, work quoted outside your plan, or third-party costs such as domain names and software licences.

Handing over

Once everything owed is paid, we'll:

• send you a copy of your content within 10 working days, or a full backup of the site's files and database where you own the site;
• hand over control of the domain names you own (see section 11);
• delete your data and backups from our systems 30 days after your service ends, unless the law requires us to keep them.

Help moving your site to a new host is charged at our standard rate, unless your order form says otherwise.

We'd always rather talk through any issue before you cancel, to see if we can put a solution in place.

20. Sub-contracting

We may sub-contract any of the work on your site. Wherever we do, we stay responsible to you for the service under these terms.

21. Care plans and add-ons

Care plans are for websites we built. We host, secure and maintain the site, and you can add Insights and Improvements. Maintenance and support contracts for larger sites work the same way. Your order form sets out which services you have, their fees and your monthly allowance.

• Hosting, security and maintenance: managed hosting, SSL, daily backups, security monitoring, software and plugin updates, uptime monitoring, and fixes to features that used to work and stopped.
• Insights: tracking where visitors drop off and what holds back enquiries, with a monthly report and clear recommendations. We aim to improve your results, but can't guarantee a particular number of enquiries or sales.
• Improvements: a monthly allowance of development time for changes to existing pages and features. We work through requests in a priority order agreed with you. Unused time doesn't carry over, and if a request is bigger than the allowance we'll tell you before we start. Fair use applies: we may spread a large batch of requests across the month, and the allowance can't be used to build new features or larger projects bit by bit over several months. We'll quote for those separately (see below).

The add-ons are only available alongside hosting, security and maintenance. If your site has been hosted or changed elsewhere since we built it, we check it over before the plan starts. If we find problems that need fixing first, we'll quote for them before the plan begins.

What's not included

The following are quoted separately, and we only start once you approve the quote:

• new pages or page templates;
• new functionality, tools or features;
• third-party integrations;
• major redesigns of an existing section;
• content creation, such as copywriting or photography, beyond minor edits;
• fixing problems caused by changes you or other third parties made.

22. Governing law and changes to these terms

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

We may update these terms from time to time, and each version has a number and a date. If a change affects your service, we'll tell you in writing at least 30 days before it applies to you, and you can cancel before it does (see section 19). Your order form, and anything else we've agreed with you in writing, still takes priority.

23. Contact us

Questions about these terms? We're happy to talk them through in plain English.