What Is in a Starwheel Website Agreement, and Why

The first page is a table. It lists your business, the pages we are building, who writes the words, where the photos come from, what features the site has, what search setup is included, how launch and handoff work, what you give us, what is not included, the fee, and the timeline.

It sits on page one on purpose. Almost every disagreement between a designer and a client comes down to something one side assumed was included. The table makes assuming impossible. If it is not in the table, it is not in the job, and there is a row that says so.

Under the table is the payment schedule. Three rows, three dates: a booking fee at signing, a second payment when you approve the design, and a final payment at launch.

The first payment is a booking fee. It reserves your place in our schedule and pays for the discovery and design work in the first week or two. Once work begins it is not refundable.

That sounds strict until you see it from our side. When we book your project we turn away the next one. If a client changes their mind in week three, the design work is done and the calendar slot is gone. Florida law recognises this: a deposit that reasonably matches the work done and the opportunity lost is enforceable, as long as it is written clearly and is not a penalty. The Florida Supreme Court set that test in Lefemine v. Baron in 1991. We keep our booking fee in proportion to the work and say plainly what it covers. That is the difference between a fair deposit and a trap.

This section is the rhythm of the project, written down. We start once the agreement is signed and the booking fee has arrived. If your materials or feedback arrive late, the dates move by the same amount. Nobody is penalised, the calendar just slides.

Two rounds of revisions are included, and a round is one consolidated list of changes. Fixing something that does not match the agreement is a correction and never counts against your rounds. Extra work is $88 per hour or a quoted price, and only ever with your written approval first. After launch, anything we built that does not work as agreed is fixed free for 30 days.

When we send you something to review, you have seven days to reply. If we do not hear back, it counts as approved and the project keeps moving. That is the rule people ask about. It exists so a project cannot stall for months on one unanswered email. In practice we reach out again before the seven days are up, but it means your site launches on the timeline we agreed instead of drifting into next quarter.

Invoices are due in 14 days. If a payment is late we email you, and if it stays late we pause work until it is sorted. Overdue amounts carry a late charge of 1.5% per month, which is the maximum simple interest Florida allows on a business debt of this size.

One more line here matters: until you have paid in full, the website and everything we made for it stays ours, and you use it under a licence. On the day the final invoice clears, it becomes yours outright.

Businesses change direction, partners leave, budgets move. So the agreement says exactly what happens.

You can cancel any time by email. You pay for the work done to that date at $88 per hour, capped at the project fee, less what you have already paid, and you keep everything built so far. If a project goes quiet for 30 days after we ask for materials or approval, we treat it as complete, invoice the balance, and hand over the work as it stands. Picking it back up later is a small restart fee. And we can end the agreement if we are asked to publish something illegal, defamatory or infringing.

We do not guarantee search rankings, traffic, leads or sales. Nobody can, and Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act treats a guarantee like that as a misleading claim. What we do promise is a site built to current search and conversion practice, with the technical setup done right.

We also say that WordPress, page builders, plugins and hosting belong to their makers and follow their terms, and that after launch you arrange your own hosting and care unless we have agreed otherwise. Your domain is registered in your name from day one.

And we say plainly that we do not certify ADA or WCAG compliance. We build with good contrast, image descriptions and labelled forms as standard, and a formal audit is its own project. We put this in writing because Florida is the second busiest state in the country for website accessibility lawsuits, with 961 federal cases filed here in 2025, most against small businesses. You should know where that line is, and that we can help you go further if you want to.

You do. When you have paid in full, the custom design and content we created for your site is yours, and we assign our copyright in it to you. You get administrator access to everything.

This line is not decoration. Under US copyright law a website built by an outside designer is not automatically the client's property, even after payment. Ownership only passes with a written assignment. Plenty of agreements never include one, which means plenty of business owners do not actually own the site they paid for. Ours does.

Two footnotes: our reusable code and templates stay ours, with a permanent licence for you to use them inside your site, and where we use AI tools we say so, review everything they produce, and note that AI generated material may not be exclusive to you.

We will never take your website down over a bill. Some agencies write that into their contracts. We think it is wrong, and Florida agrees: logging into a site you own to disable it can be a crime under the state's computer offences statute, whatever a contract says. Our protection is ownership until you have paid, and that is all we need.

Our liability is limited to the fees you have paid us, and neither of us can claim lost profits from the other. Florida courts uphold this kind of cap when it is clear and easy to find, which is why it has its own bold heading. If someone sues over content you supplied, you cover that. If someone sues over our work, we cover that.

Florida law applies and any dispute goes to Manatee County, but before either of us could file anything we have to give the other 30 days to work it out. And email counts: approvals, changes and signatures by email are binding under Florida's electronic transactions law.

We could have kept a long contract full of "hereinafter" and "notwithstanding". Plenty of agencies do. We rewrote ours because the agreement is the first piece of work a client ever sees from us, and we wanted it to say what our websites say: we know what we are doing, we have nothing to hide, and we would rather explain something than bury it.

If you are thinking about a new site and want to see the full agreement before we talk, ask. It is four pages, and you can read it with your coffee.

Starwheel Websites is a web design and SEO studio in Bradenton, Florida. This article explains our own agreement and is not legal advice for yours.

Lefemine v. Baron, 573 So. 2d 326 (Fla. 1991), the Florida Supreme Court test for deposits and liquidated damages.

Florida Statutes 687.02 and 687.03, the 18 percent simple interest ceiling.

Florida Statutes 668.50, the Uniform Electronic Transaction Act, why email approvals and e signatures are binding.

Florida Statutes 501.204, the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.

Florida Statutes 815.06, offenses against users of computers and computer systems.

Chetu, Inc. v. CA Short Co. (Fla. 4th DCA 2026), a Florida appeals court upholding a clear limitation of liability clause in a software contract.

17 U.S.C. 204, copyright transfers must be in writing, and 17 U.S.C. 101, the work made for hire definition.

U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2 (January 2025), on the copyright status of AI generated material.

Seyfarth Shaw, federal website accessibility lawsuit filings in 2025, the source of the Florida case count.