Creating an Invoice Template for Website Development for Customer Service Made Easy

Invoice template for website development for Customer Service

so the client was sued for 70 000 for a copyrighted image that his designer had placed on the site at the time of designing and developing the website and so the client turned around and sued his designer and it was an absolute mess so in this video i want to share with you what you need to do to avoid any nightmare situations just like this one all right now before we get any further into this video i think it's important that i state for my own safety that i am not an attorney obviously and i am not giving you legal advice in this video nor am i certified to give legal advice so when it comes to contracts you probably want to talk to your attorney about these things but what i am going to share with you in this video is the exact contract template that i use for all of my web design projects this is going to give you a really good foundation to basically plug and play add any additional details or legalities that you need to to this contract and you're going to be in a really great spot to start sending these contracts to your clients now in freelancing a good contract serves three purposes first it should protect you as the freelancer second it should protect your client and third it should set great expectations for all parties involved to make sure that you guys know your roles you know what to expect and you can have a good smooth working relationship and so in this video i'm going to walk you through the most important aspects of any good contract and then again you're going to be able to click the link in the description and download this template for free now the last thing that i'll say before we dive into this and it kind of goes without saying you should never do any work before you have a signed agreement this is the first thing that should happen before any project starts so let's dive into it alright so here we have our web design agreement template and if you click the link down in the description of this video you're going to be able to download this for free but i'm going to walk you through this and the most important aspects of this agreement and the first and possibly most important is a section where we can outline the scope of the work and then also the payment for the project we want to make sure that we outline these things really clearly ing to the project because obviously all these things are going to change and we don't want to leave anything open to interpretation every single part of the project should have a very clear outline of what's going to be done when it's going to be done and how much it's going to cost to make sure that there's no confusion so first you're going to outline the scope of the project including everything that you're going to do how many pages design development any benefits or features and then you also want to add on right here any additional services like integrations or support hours to make sure again that there's nothing that is left on a set then what you're going to want to do is outline the schedule for this project now setting deadlines is going to help keep both you on track and your client on track but what i've found is it's always nice to set more of a ballpark so rather than saying this is the official end date we can say we want to finish this project in between six and eight weeks this way if we rush the project we can finish it earlier but also we're not going to put ourselves on too much of a time frame in case we get busy with other projects and then down below we're going to outline the payment and again we always want to make sure that we're collecting money up front what i like to do is outline the payment in terms of an initial deposit a second payment and when that happens and then also a final payment and when that's going to happen and then i've also got a spot for additional hourly work and what our hourly rate is just to make sure that if there is additional work we can take care of that and keep track of those hours and bills separately and then finally i've got a little note here that talks about additional expenses but this first section is going to be the most critical to make sure everything is outlined because again if you forget anything chances are your client is going to either try to take advantage of you or they're going to be frustrated because they don't know what to expect so the second part of this agreement is the term and termination now within this you want to make sure that you were outlining a couple different questions first can the client get out of this agreement can you as the contractor get out of this agreement and what are the penalties if either of you does get out of this agreement so you can see in this template i have very clearly stated that this contract is ongoing until the work is completed but also it says if the client wishes to break the agreement and cancel the project they will still be liable to pay the agreed upon amount now you can change this ing to your own company policies but i think it's important to set these expectations here to make sure that you don't get halfway into the project and have your client bail without paying you what you're owed next is the website responsibility now this is something that i added in recently as i heard a story from a client where their web designer had placed some copyrighted images on their site and then a few months after that the client actually got sued for a pretty hefty amount of money because the web designer didn't do a good job of using the proper content and images now for me as a freelancer in my agency i always make sure that we are using images contents assets all these things that are legal to have on their site right we license them we do everything properly but one thing that i'm not able to control is if i pass a website off to a client and then somewhere down the road they illegally take images off the internet and put them on their website and before they know it they find themselves in a lawsuit and they want to drag me into it and so i like to have this section here that says i am not liable or responsible for anything you might put on your website after it's delivered this is a really great way to prevent any future lawsuits down the road that uh you know for things that you're not responsible for next is the section about representations this is pretty simple this just outlines the roles of both you and your client whether that's the authority to sign or what's expected of both of you again this is a lot of stuff that you can just copy and paste from my template into your agreements and then we've got confidential information this is something that really puts your clients at ease because they want to know if they're going to bring you in and share things like login information or company strategy or assets or whatever it might be they want to know that that's going to be safe and that you're going to respect their privacy and confidentiality and so putting in this putting this in your agreement is going to be a great way to just reassure them that you are a professional and that they can trust you bringing you in to their business and finally i've got a final section labeled general this is where you can fit in any additional notices that you would like just to make sure that you're covered again this is a lot of things that you're going to be able to just copy and paste into your agreement but it's also a great section to slide in any additional info that you would like to have in your agreements alright so if you found any value in this video or if you are going to go download my contract template please hit that like button on this video it really helps me out and if you haven't yet please be sure to subscribe to my channel as i've got new videos coming out every single week just like this one so thanks so much for watching and we'll catch you in the next video [Music]