Vendors and contracts

How to commission a website or an app so the agency does not have to guess. The articles walk through the brief, the project stages and the order in which changing your mind is still free, then through reading a quote and comparing offers. The second half is about the contract: what website maintenance covers, what an SLA is, who owns the logo and the code. There are also plain explanations of the words used in proposals — HTML, headless, “modern website” — so you can judge an offer without reading code. A separate thread is money: why two offers for the same website can differ sixfold, whether a subscription or a one-off payment works out cheaper, what a cheap website really costs, and what an app costs when it is worked out rather than quoted as a range. For apps and cloud services: what to check in an SLA and who is responsible for what in data security. Finally, acceptance — how to test a website so the result means something, and why a PageSpeed score is not the same thing as Core Web Vitals. For whoever runs the project on the client side. Start with the website brief and what you buy when you sign a maintenance contract.