Website design dispute

stealthgeek · 27 Mar 2013 at 10:54

Hi OcUK'ers

My missus has a bit of a problem with a certain web design company...

Basically, the company has just emailed her and asked her to pay for design work that never made it to production, about £800 at £40 per hour. The design was never agreed on, they kept getting basics wrong such as colours, fonts etc. No contract was ever agreed, this was all done over phone or face to face.

Now, Im no legal expert, but I dont think they have a leg to stand on? I know in law a verbal agreement is viewed as the same as a written one, but if that work was never up to scratch, surely they cant bill her for the time they took consistently getting it wrong? She still has, and always had, her old site in place which is fine for her. Shes a bit worried they will pursue this with the small claims court if pushed, but Im inclined to tell them to bring it on, quite frankly.

Does anyone here have any advice?

stealthgeek · 27 Mar 2013 at 11:07

She has emails I think stating 'No, thats not what I asked for' and 'No, those arent the fonts we agreed on', buty thats about it. She's going to check her sent items for more info. I get the point about it from their perspective, but surely thats why these agreements are drawn up in the first place? If they had come to her with a contract that had provisions for design/acceptance, then fair enough, she would have to pay and I would totally agree. I can see it from both sides, but surely its their responsibility as a service provider to get these things in writing?

Point is, they didnt do any of that, and frankly their design work was unbelievably poor, very Geocities-circa late 90's with clashing colours.

stealthgeek · 27 Mar 2013 at 11:54

the_r_sole said:
op, did your wife ever ask how much it was likely to cost?
I'd be surprised if there was never any discussion of the costs involved before the work started with or without a written contract

Im not sure, she is going to print off any emails relating to this at the weekend and we'll have a look at exactly what was said.

stealthgeek · 27 Mar 2013 at 12:24

Draeger said:
Agreed. I always show the client an index page and one or two further pages. We then fine tune every detail together such as fonts, colours, layout etc. Only then will I proceed to carry on with the remainder of the pages and even then I'll regularly upload it to a test domain to let them view the progress. If at any stage of the game anything crops up that they don't like/want they can inform me and we'll discuss how to proceed from there. I'd never dream of just blindly carrying on for another £800 worth of working hours without letting them see each stage as I went along.

Thing is, the site was just a basic static html page, she just wanted a main page and 'what we do' / 'contact' page - no snazzy flash, no videos, no baskets/checkouts, no SSL certs... nothing. She wanted plain white with blue colours in the logos, fonts etc she got flourescent pink in one design.