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Need: Service Contracts

I'm doing my first huge "on the side" web design and programming job for a company up in Portland. I'm most of the way through the project at this point, and the guy running the show for the client is being a real piece of work. I'm dealing, primarily, with an old college buddy and good friend up there, but, for the most part, the project isn't going very smooth. Between client changing his mind at the worst times, assuming I can read his inner most thoughts, putting his employees in the middle of it, etc..., it's just been a real mess. I'll be lucky to break even on this whole thing (because I had to sub-contract some of the back-end programming that was out of my league).

I did this because my friend that works there said his boss was riding him about it, so asked if I could help them out. It was more of a handshake deal, because I had the confidence from my friend that things would work out fine. Neither he, or I, expected the mess to come out like it did, and because it was more of a handshake kind of deal with just vaguely written service agreements, I'm getting bitten in the backside.

So here's where you guys come in. I know a great deal of you out there are Web programmers, services providers, consultants, designers, etc... . I'd appreciate it greatly if you could send me a sample contract that you use for these types of things. I'd also be interested in getting contracts from folks who do systems and IT services (building and repairing computers, networks, etc...) as I do that quite a bit, too (it's much easier, as many of those folks are local). If you could e-mail them to me at jake [at] utterly boring [dot] [com] that'd be just dandy. Thanks again for your help, everybody.

(And yes, I know there are sample templates out there online for this type of thing, I'd just like to know what real people are using.)

Posted by Jake on 08/11/05 @ 09:14 AM
Posted in Jake | 8 Comments | Permalink
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8 Comments

Mary said on 08/11/05 @ 10:33 AM:
I know it's not related to your post, but I thought you may find the link of interest. -a little flash game.

Jake said on 08/11/05 @ 10:39 AM:
Thanks, Mary, but I linked to that game last week.

pb said on 08/11/05 @ 11:32 AM:
Sorry to hear about the trouble. I'm a freelance web developer and most of the time the clients I work with have their own contracts they want to use. But I have used a variation on the fairly informal letter contract that's in Nolo Press' Working For Yourself. The book has a ton of great advice for freelancers...definitely worth the price.

Jake said on 08/11/05 @ 11:34 AM:
Thanks for the tip, Paul. This company has is not the most Web-savvy group, which as made this even more complicated because they don't know what they want, and what I'm providing apparently wasn't it.

Aaron said on 08/11/05 @ 02:50 PM:
Doing projects for clients is ALWAYS a headache. You should create websites for yourself. Be a publisher. Over the course of years your content sites will develop traffic that will be valuable to advertisers. You stay in control and work on your own terms. You also gain equity in your work because you retain ownership.

Freedom!! :)

Jake said on 08/11/05 @ 02:53 PM:
I would love to, Aaron. But I have a family to feed and I can't take that risk (I have a good job in Sunriver), and if somebody would fund me, I've got some great localized content idea that I would LOVE to be able to persue full time. :-)

Patrick said on 08/11/05 @ 04:10 PM:
Huh. Nothing like a hand shake side job ;)

jared said on 04/04/08 @ 10:03 PM:
I remember getting screwed like this. I ended up realizing that I gave a lot of time, but it was a fairly cheap lesson in the scheme of things. Could've been worse.

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