Terms of business

1. Who we are, and what these terms cover

CoveMedia is a web design and hosting business based in Shell Cove, New South Wales, serving Shellharbour, the Illawarra and beyond. In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean CoveMedia. "You" means the person or business engaging us.

These terms cover design, build, hosting and related work.

These terms become the agreement between us when you accept a quote, or pay a deposit or invoice for the work, whichever happens first.

Our Terms of Use are a separate document covering the use of our website. They are not part of this agreement and nothing in them changes it.

We may use contractors or specialist suppliers for parts of a job. Where we do, the work is still ours to deliver and we stay responsible to you for it.

You can reach us at info@covemedia.au.

2. Quotes and scope

Work is quoted in writing after we have discussed what you need. A quote sets out what is included, what it costs, and anything it specifically excludes. It is open for 30 days unless it says otherwise.

What is in the quote is the scope. Anything outside it is quoted separately before it is done. We will not do additional chargeable work without telling you first.

Each build includes one round of revisions on the agreed design.

3. Payment

A deposit of 50% is payable before work starts. This deposit is non-refundable, because it reserves your place in our schedule and covers the discovery, planning and concept work carried out at the start of a project.

The balance is payable on completion, before the site is moved to its live address. Other invoices are payable 7 days from the date of issue.

Our prices include all relevant taxes. The price on your quote is the price you pay. If the tax treatment of what we do changes, the price we quoted you does not move.

If an invoice is overdue we may pause work, and we may hold back the transfer of a finished site to its live address, until it is paid. We will tell you before we do either. Work already paid for is unaffected.

Where an amount stays unpaid after we have asked for it, we may recover the reasonable costs of collecting it. We would rather talk to you than do that, so tell us if there is a problem with an invoice.

Payments are made in full. You cannot hold back or reduce a payment to set off an amount you say we owe you, unless we have agreed it in writing or a court has decided it.

4. What we need from you, and what happens if a project stalls

Builds depend on receiving your content, images, logos, approvals and access in reasonable time. Where a project waits on material from you, the timeline moves accordingly and we may need to fit the restart around other work.

You confirm that any text, images, logos, fonts or other material you supply is either yours or licensed for the use you are asking us to make of it, and that we may use it to build and publish your site. If a third party makes a claim against us because material you supplied was not yours to give, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it. Where we source stock imagery on your behalf, we will tell you what licence applies.

If we do not hear from you for 30 days we may place the project on hold. If we do not hear from you for 90 days we may close it. Closing a project does not refund the deposit, and restarting later may need to be re-quoted at the rates then current.

5. Changes to an agreed scope

You can ask for a change at any point. We will price it, tell you what it does to the timeline, and wait for you to accept that before starting it.

A change is charged on top of the agreed price, not out of it. Where a change means redoing something we have already built, the cost of that rework goes into the price of the change. It is not absorbed into what you have already paid.

We may also decline a change. If it would undermine the design, break something we have warranted, or is simply not work we want to take on, we will tell you plainly and say why.

Once the build has been accepted under section 6, a change is not a variation at all. It is new work, quoted as new work.

6. Review, acceptance and defects

Finishing the build. The build is finished when it matches the quote. If something in the agreed scope is missing or wrong when we show it to you, we have not finished, and we finish it. That is not a revision and it does not use anything up.

Your revision round. Each build includes one round of revisions on the agreed design, as set out in section 2. That round is where you shape the design, and it is the point at which to tell us what you want changed.

Raise it as one consolidated set of changes, in the 14 days after we show you the site or before you pay the final invoice, whichever comes first. If we have heard nothing in that time we will take it that you have nothing to raise.

Everything you want changed goes in that round. Anything that reasonably falls within the scope of your quote must be raised there, because that round is the last point at which it can be raised as part of the build. There is no second round, and paying the final invoice closes the first one.

Anything beyond that round, or outside the quoted scope, is a variation under section 5: we price it, and we do it once you accept the price. After the round closes, the only thing we look at without a quote is a material defect.

Acceptance. The build is accepted when you pay the final invoice.

Design and defects are different things, and they close at different times.

Design is a matter of judgement. Two people can look at the same page and want different things, and the same person can want something different six months later. That is normal, and it is not a fault in the work. So the design is not settled by a standard that can be argued over afterwards. It is settled by a moment.

That moment is the final invoice being paid.

Paying the final invoice says that you have reviewed the site and accepted the design in full, across every device size it was built for. From then on, no further work on the look of the site is done without a quote.

A defect after that point is a material defect only. It is one of two things:

• a part of the design that does not match a direct request you made to us in writing before you paid the final invoice; or
• something on the site that is not functioning as it was built to function.

A subjective judgement about the design is not a material defect, and it does not become one by being described as affecting how the site is used or how well it works. If a thing was a matter of opinion before you paid, it is still a matter of opinion afterwards, and it is quoted as new work rather than owed as a repair.

A material defect is ours for 90 days, and it is judged against the day we delivered it. Where something is a material defect on the test above, it is ours to put right at no charge for 90 days from the date you paid the final invoice. Two things shape that:

• The standard is the day of delivery. The test is whether the work was correct and current when it launched, measured against the versions of WordPress, the builder, the plugins and the browsers in use at that time. It is not judged against a later version of any of them.
• Something that worked when we delivered it and stopped working later is not a defect. When a WordPress, plugin, PHP or browser update changes what the site sits on, or a third-party service changes or withdraws, the site has not become faulty. What it sits on moved. Keeping a site working as the ground shifts under it is maintenance, and it is quoted as work rather than owed as a warranty.

We build and test for current versions of the major browsers, on current phone, tablet and desktop screen sizes. We do not build for browsers their own vendor no longer supports, and something that goes wrong only in one of those is not a defect.

At 90 days the site is provided as it stands. By then a site has lived through platform updates, plugin updates and whatever has changed at the services it depends on, and working out what caused what stops being realistic. So unless you raised an issue with us inside the 90 days, the site is provided as is from that point, and any work on it is quoted before it is done.

Nothing here limits your rights under the Australian Consumer Law; see section 19. New pages, new features and changes of mind are new work, and are quoted.

7. Ownership of the finished site

On final payment the site is yours. That includes the design, the layout, the code written for it, and your content and images. You can do what you like with it, move it wherever you like, and have anyone you like work on it. Two things you agree to sit alongside that, and neither of them changes whose site it is: the special-pricing conditions in section 8, if they apply to your build, and the credit in section 9.

What we hand over is the working site and its content, and the files and access needed to run it, host it elsewhere and have someone else work on it. There are no separate source files held back.

Some things in a site are licensed rather than owned, and a licence is not ours to give away. Stock images, fonts, paid plugins and the Oxygen builder each come with their own terms, and some are tied to us or to the site staying where it is. We will tell you which ones apply to your build and what you would need to hold in your own name if you moved it. Section 16 covers the Oxygen licence specifically.

We keep ownership of the general tools, techniques, code libraries and methods we have developed and reuse across projects. Nothing here stops us using that general knowledge and experience on other work.

We may show the finished site in our portfolio, on our website, in proposals and in other marketing, and describe the work we did on it. So that the example we show stays the one we built, we keep a copy of the site as originally delivered, even if the live site changes later. You grant us a non-exclusive, ongoing licence to reproduce your logo, images, text and other material as they appear in that copy, for that purpose.

8. Special pricing

Sometimes we build a site at a special price, well below our standard rate, because the finished site will be a showcase of our work. The discount is not a donation. It is paid for by the site staying the way we built it, and staying somewhere we can point at it, while it is doing that job for us.

So where special pricing applies, for 24 months from the date the site goes live, you agree that:

• the site stays hosted by us, at our usual monthly hosting fee;
• its design and build are not altered by anyone other than us without our written agreement, though you can of course update your own content through WordPress whenever you like;
• we may present it as a current example of our work.

You still own the site throughout. These are things you agree to do, not something we are holding back from you. You can move it, change it or have someone else work on it at any time by ending these conditions first.

Ending the conditions early. The special price and our standard price are both shown on your quote and invoice. The difference between them is the balance of the standard price, and it stays unpaid only while the conditions above are being met. Pay the difference at any time and the conditions end immediately, with nothing further owing. If the conditions stop being met before the 24 months are up, the difference becomes payable, because the basis for the discount has gone.

At 24 months, or on payment of the difference, this section ends and the ordinary hosting terms in section 10 apply.

Paying an invoice that shows a special price confirms that you accept this section.

9. The CoveMedia credit

Every site we build carries a small credit in the footer linking to covemedia.au. It is attribution for the work, in the same way a builder leaves a plate on a job or a photographer keeps a byline, and it is included as standard rather than charged for.

It is also how a fair amount of our work reaches us. Somebody sees a site they like, follows the credit, and gets in touch.

If you would prefer it was not there, tell us and we will take it off. Because removing it ends the exposure the site was giving us, a fee of 10% of the original build price applies.

On a special-pricing build the credit stays in place for the period in section 8. To remove it before then, end those conditions the usual way, by paying the difference between the special price and the standard price.

10. Hosting, email and your own accounts

Hosting and mailbox services are billed monthly in advance and continue until cancelled. You can cancel at any time and we do not lock you into a term, other than the hosting commitment that comes with special pricing in section 8. Fees already paid for the current period are not refunded on cancellation.

If you cancel, we will provide a copy of your site files and database so it can be moved to another host. We do not hold your site hostage.

We take regular backups of sites we host and can usually restore one on request. Backups are a convenience rather than an archive, so keep your own copies of anything you could not stand to lose. We keep backups only while we are hosting the site. They stop when the hosting stops, so take your own copy before you go.

We aim to keep hosted sites available and running well, and we monitor them, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted service. Outages caused by upstream providers, network faults, or events outside our control are not something we can promise against.

Domain registration, mailbox subscriptions, paid plugins and any third-party service your site depends on are yours, in your name where possible, and yours to pay for. We will tell you what they cost before we set them up. If one of them lapses, the part of your site that depends on it stops working, and restoring it is chargeable.

11. Speed and performance

We build for speed. It drives most of the decisions in a build: hand-written code rather than a page builder's output, lean and properly sized images, as few plugins as the job allows, and caching in front of all of it.

What we deliver at launch. Where the brief allows it, your site scores 100 in all four of Google's PageSpeed Insights categories, being Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO, and we build to an intended full page load of two seconds or less. Those are the numbers the site launches on, measured on the live site, and we will show them to you.

When that target does not apply. Some things a site is asked to do cost more load time than the target leaves room for, and no amount of building skill removes that cost. The usual ones are video, large photo galleries, and third-party integrations such as booking systems, payment gateways, live feeds, maps, chat widgets, tracking and analytics.

Where your site needs one of those, we will build it as lean as it can be made and tell you what it is costing you. But the requirement wins, the four scores may not be reachable, and we cannot fix a cost that belongs to somebody else's code running on your page. This is a choice rather than a fault, and we will tell you before you make it, not afterwards.

The target also assumes we are hosting the site. Where a site is hosted elsewhere we will still build it to perform, but the server, its caching and its network are not ours to tune, and we cannot commit to a number on someone else's infrastructure.

What the Accessibility score is, and is not. The Accessibility category in PageSpeed Insights is an automated check of a set of common problems. Scoring 100 means the site passes those checks. It is not an audit against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and it is not a statement that your site meets your obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 or any other law. Automated testing cannot see much of what actually matters to somebody using a screen reader, and it cannot review content you add later. We build to sensible accessibility practice as a matter of course. If you need conformance to a stated WCAG level, or a formal audit by someone who does that work, tell us before we start and we will quote it as part of the build.

After launch, a score is a measurement rather than a permanent state. It is taken on one device, on one connection, on one day. Scores drift afterwards for reasons that are nobody's doing, including WordPress, plugin and browser updates; changes to how Google measures, weights or reports these categories; changes, outages or routing changes at any hosting, network or CDN provider, or anywhere along the path to the visitor; and content, images, plugins or embeds added to the site later.

The scores are part of what we deliver, so if they were not achieved when the site went live, that is a material defect and section 6 decides it, including the 90 day period. They are measurable, which is what makes them a defect question rather than a matter of opinion.

A score that was achieved and later drifted is not a defect. Investigating or restoring one is chargeable work that we quote before doing.

The scores can only be read on a live site. Where launch is more than 30 days after you paid the final invoice, the platform will have moved underneath the build in the meantime, and getting back to the same numbers may take work that we quote. Section 19 applies to all of this.

A defect is still a defect, on the terms in section 6. None of this covers something we actually built wrong. If a score falls because of a mistake in our own work, that is a defect and section 6 decides it, including the rule that the work is judged against the day we delivered it rather than against whatever the platform has become since.

Where you would like the site watched over time rather than measured once, we can quote for that.

12. Security, updates, and the two hosting plans

Keeping a site safe is split three ways, and only part of it moves with the plan you are on.

The server and the software stack it runs are maintained by our hosting provider on every plan.

An application firewall sits in front of every site on both plans, filtering traffic and blocking common attacks such as injection attempts and cross-site scripting.

Keeping the software current is the part that differs by plan, and it is the part that matters most. Most compromised WordPress sites were not cleverly attacked. They were scanned automatically for a known hole in software nobody had updated.

Hosting. The stack, SSL, caching, daily backups, the mail server and the firewall above. WordPress core updates install themselves as they are released, unsupervised. The plugins are yours to keep current, or ask us and we will quote it. There is no malware scanning on this plan.

Managed hosting. Everything in Hosting, and two things it does not have.

First, malware scanning. Your files are scanned at the server for known malware and injected code, and anything found is quarantined and flagged. This is not running on the Hosting plan.

Second, we keep the site current for you. WordPress core and every plugin carrying an update are brought forward weekly, applied to a copy of the site first, checked against your own pages, and rolled back if an update breaks something. Core goes through that same checked run on this plan rather than installing itself unsupervised. Security releases are applied as they land rather than waiting for the weekly run.

Managed hosting also includes one small content change a month, such as a price, a photo or a paragraph. It applies to the month it falls in and does not accumulate, so an unused month is not banked for later. Anything beyond it is quoted before we start.

Why we recommend Managed hosting. The gap between a vulnerability being published and being scanned for is short, and an unchecked update carries its own risk of quietly breaking a page. Managed hosting closes the first without opening the second, because nothing reaches your live site until it has been verified against it.

What we do not warrant. We do not warrant that any site is secure, on either plan. We are not responsible for loss or damage caused by hacking, malware, injected code, brute force attempts, or any other unauthorised access to a site, nor for anything that follows from it.

That holds on Managed hosting as well. Managed hosting shortens the window, it does not remove it. Where a vulnerability is exploited before a fix has been released, or before a released fix could reasonably be applied, no schedule of updates would have prevented it.

Cleaning, restoring or rebuilding a site after an intrusion is quoted work on either plan.

You are responsible for the accounts and passwords you hold, and for who you give them to. Where a site is damaged or compromised by a change we did not make, by a plugin or theme added by someone else, or by a login that was shared or left weak, putting it right is chargeable.

Nothing in this section limits your rights under the Australian Consumer Law; see section 19.

13. Legal pages on your site

Most sites we build include a privacy policy and terms of use. Unless you supply your own, we provide general-purpose versions written to suit the kind of online presence your site has.

They are a starting point, not legal advice. They are not written for your particular business, and they do not account for how you collect, store, use or disclose personal information, what your industry requires of you, or any obligation that applies to you rather than to businesses generally. Where the wording matters, have a solicitor review it before you publish. If your site takes payments, holds customer accounts, handles health or financial information, or deals with customers outside Australia, we recommend that rather than merely suggest it.

We do not warrant that these documents are accurate, complete, current, or sufficient for your purposes, and we are not responsible for keeping them up to date as the law changes or as your business does. Subject to section 19, we accept no liability for any loss, claim, penalty or exposure arising from your use of them, from anything they do not cover, or from any protection they do not give you. Once published on your site they are your documents, and you are responsible for what they say.

You can supply your own versions instead. We will put them up as part of the build, or afterwards as quoted work.

14. Personal information

Your site will probably collect personal information, even if that is only a name and an email address from an enquiry form. Where it does, you are the business that collects it and you are responsible for it. We handle it only to build, host and support the site for you, and we do not use it for anything else.

You confirm that you have the right to collect what your site collects, that you tell people what you do with it, and that anything you ask us to import or migrate was properly obtained in the first place.

If we become aware that a site we host has been accessed or its data exposed, we will tell you as soon as we reasonably can and help you work out what happened. Deciding what to do next is yours: whether the incident has to be reported, who has to be told, and when. Those are obligations that attach to you as the business that collected the information, and we are not able to make that call for you. The general-purpose privacy policy described in section 13 does not answer it either.

Where we hold anything of yours, we hold it under our own privacy policy, which is on our website.

15. Search, traffic and results

Every site we build is put together so it can be found: clean code, sensible structure, fast pages, proper titles and descriptions, rich snippets where they apply, and a sitemap submitted to Google.

What we cannot do is promise a position, an amount of traffic, or a number of enquiries. Those depend on your market, your competitors, what you do with the site afterwards, and on search engines whose ranking systems are theirs and change without notice. Anyone who does promise you a position is guessing.

16. Third-party services and the Oxygen licence

Sites we build rely on third-party software and services, including WordPress, the Oxygen builder, our server and network providers, and any plugins or integrations agreed as part of your build. Those services have their own terms, and their availability and pricing are not within our control. Where a third-party service changes in a way that affects your site, we will tell you and set out the options.

Your site is built with Oxygen. We hold the Oxygen licence and provide it on the sites we host, so while your site is with us it is covered and you do not need to buy your own copy. Our licence key stays with us and is not transferred with a site. If you host the site yourself, or move it to another provider, you would need your own Oxygen licence to keep receiving builder updates. Nothing switches off without one and the site keeps running as it is, but it stops receiving builder fixes and compatibility work, and because WordPress itself keeps moving, an update on that side can in time break something an up-to-date builder would have handled. None of this affects your ownership of the site, its content or its design.

17. Confidentiality

Each of us may learn things about the other's business in the course of the work. Neither of us will pass those on, except where we have to by law, or where we need to tell a supplier something in order to do the job.

This does not stop us showing the finished site as described in section 7.

18. Ending a project

You can end a project at any time by telling us in writing. The deposit is not refunded, and any work carried out beyond it is payable at our standard rates up to the date you tell us.

We may end a project if an invoice stays unpaid after we have asked for it, if we are asked to do something unlawful, or if the working relationship has broken down to the point where finishing well is not realistic. If we do that, you pay for work done to that point, and we will hand over what has been paid for.

Sections that are meant to outlast a project do so, including ownership, confidentiality and liability.

19. Liability

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law that cannot lawfully be excluded. Where our liability can be limited, it is limited, at our option, to resupplying the service or paying the cost of having it resupplied.

Otherwise, and to the extent permitted by law, our total liability for everything connected with a project is limited to the fees you have paid us for that project, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including lost profits, lost business, lost data or loss of goodwill.

You remain responsible for keeping your own copies of anything you consider important, and for the accuracy of the content published on your site.

Neither of us is liable for a failure to perform, for a delay, or for a change in how something performs, where the cause is genuinely outside our control. That includes outages, faults, maintenance, routing changes, price changes, policy changes or withdrawal of service at any host, network, registrar, CDN, mail or other provider or platform we depend on; changes to WordPress, to plugins, to browsers, or to the way search engines and measurement tools rank, measure or report; the device, connection or location of a visitor; natural events and severe weather; interruptions to power or telecommunications; malicious acts by third parties; and acts of government. If something like that affects your project or your site, we will tell you and agree a way forward.

20. Changes to these terms

We publish new versions of these terms from time to time. Which version applies to you depends on what you are buying, because the two are not the same kind of arrangement.

Design and build work runs on the version named on your quote and invoice. That version is fixed for the life of the project and does not change under you partway through. A new version applies to work quoted after it is published.

Hosting runs month to month on the terms published at the time. It is a rolling subscription rather than a fixed term, so each month renews on the current version of these terms as published on our website. There is nothing to opt out of and nothing to sign again; if you would rather not continue on a new version, you can cancel as set out in section 10.

We will tell you at least 30 days before a change that materially affects you takes effect, and always before a change in price, so you can decide rather than find out on an invoice.

21. Resolving a disagreement

If something goes wrong between us, tell us in writing what the problem is and what you would like done about it. We will come back to you and we will try to sort it out by talking first.

If that does not work within a reasonable time, either of us can ask for mediation before starting court proceedings, and neither of us will start proceedings until we have at least tried. This does not stop either of us going straight to a court for an urgent order where one is genuinely needed.

22. General

These terms, together with your quote, are the whole of what we have agreed. They replace anything said or written beforehand. Where a quote and these terms disagree, the quote wins on the specifics of your project and these terms cover everything else.

Any terms printed on your own purchase order or supplier forms do not apply to this agreement unless we have agreed to them in writing.

A change to this agreement only counts if both of us have agreed it in writing.

If one part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, it is removed and the rest still stands.

If one of us lets something go once, that does not mean it has been given up for good.

Neither of us can hand this agreement to someone else without the other agreeing in writing, except that we may transfer it as part of a sale or restructure of our own business, and we will tell you if that happens.

Notices under these terms are given in writing, by email to the addresses we normally use with each other.

23. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia, and the courts of that State have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

24. Contact

Questions about these terms can go to info@covemedia.au, and we will come back to you.