The small print, in plain English.

These terms cover the websites, hosting and support we provide to businesses. They sit alongside your plan or quote, and our Privacy Policy. If your plan or quote says something different, what it says wins.

Who we are

Online Design UK, Friar Gate Studios, 22 Ford Street, Derby, DE1 1EE. In these terms, “we” and “us” mean us, and “you” means the business we are working for.

What we provide

The plan or quote you accept says what you are getting: the design and build of your site, hosting we manage, support, and any ongoing development. We will do that work with reasonable skill and care. Anything not written in your plan or quote is not included, though we are happy to price it.

What we need from you

• Text, images and other material when we ask for it, and the right to use all of it. If you give us something you do not own, that is on you, not us.
• Prompt answers and sign-off. If a project waits on you, the timetable moves.
• Accurate details, kept up to date.
• Care with your logins. Use strong, unique passwords, keep them to people who need them, and tell us the day someone leaves or a login may have been seen by someone else.

Prices and payment

Prices are in pounds sterling. Invoices are payable on receipt. Monthly plans are billed in advance. If an invoice is late, we may pause work and hosting after we have written to you, and we may charge interest at the rate the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 allows.

Who owns what

You own your content: your words, your pictures, your logo.

We own the copyright in the design of your website: the layout, the graphics, the styling and the code we write. It is the same as a photographer, who owns the photographs and licenses their use. Once your build is paid for in full, you have a licence to use the design on your own website. You may not copy, reproduce, resell or reuse the design, or have anyone else do it, without our written consent. That includes using it on another site or handing it to another agency to imitate.

Our tools, code libraries, templates and methods stay ours. Third-party software, such as WordPress, plugins and fonts, stays under its own licence.

Hosting, uptime and security

We choose hosting providers with care and keep your site’s software up to date: WordPress, plugins, and the server software the host runs, including PHP. We take a daily backup of every site we host, whether or not it is on a plan. Backups are stored on separate, redundant cloud infrastructure, on a different server from your live website. We watch for security alerts and, for every site we host, apply fixes as soon as they are available and safe to apply.

No website can be made completely safe, and no host can promise it will never go down. Attacks reach software before a fix exists: a flaw can be found in PHP, WordPress or a plugin and used by criminals before anyone can patch it. So we do not promise that your site will be available all the time, or that it can never be hacked. We promise to take reasonable steps to prevent it, and to move quickly when something goes wrong.

If your site goes down or is attacked, we will:

• work to get it back online, from the latest clean backup where there is one;
• find out how it happened and close the gap;
• tell you what we know, in plain words;
• help you tell the Information Commissioner and anyone affected, if personal data was involved. The law gives 72 hours from when you become aware of it.

Planned maintenance may take the site offline briefly. We try to do it at quiet times and to warn you first where we can.

Our liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability that the law does not allow us to limit. That includes death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud, and fraudulent misrepresentation.

Subject to that:

• Things outside our control. We are not responsible for an outage, a loss of data or a breach caused by something we could not reasonably have prevented. That includes cyber attacks, malware and hacking where we had taken reasonable security steps, a flaw in software we did not write that had no fix available yet, and a failure by a hosting company, domain registrar, CDN, payment provider or other third party.
• Things on your side. We are not responsible for loss that follows from your own login being shared or guessed, from content you gave us, or from changes made to your site by someone else you let in.
• Indirect loss. We are not responsible for loss of profit, sales, contracts, goodwill or expected savings, or for any loss that was not an obvious result of what went wrong.
• A limit. For anything else, our total liability to you for all claims arising from one event is limited to one month of your fees. If you pay yearly, a month is one twelfth of your annual fee. The limit is three months of your fees (three twelfths of an annual fee) where the loss was caused by our failing to do what we promised on hosting and security: not applying an available fix promptly, or not taking the daily backup.

We think this is fair for the price. If you need more cover for your business, tell us before you sign and we will talk it through. Many businesses also take out their own cyber insurance, and we would encourage you to look at it.

Events outside our control

Neither of us is in breach if we cannot do what we promised because of something neither of us could reasonably control: a power or internet failure, a fault at a provider, a fire, flood or strike, or a government order. If it goes on for more than 30 days, either of us can end the agreement.

The Free Website Check

The Free Website Check is a quick, automated read of one page, meant as a guide. It is not an audit or a guarantee, and we are not responsible for decisions made on the strength of it.

Ending the agreement

Monthly plans run for a minimum of 6 months. After that, either of us can end a plan with 30 days’ notice in writing. Email is fine. If you end a plan within the first 6 months, the fees for the rest of that period are still due. We can end it sooner if you break these terms and do not put it right within 14 days of us asking. When it ends you pay for work done up to that date, and we will hand over your content and a copy of your site on request. After hosting ends we may delete your site and backups.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will tell you about any change that matters at least 30 days before it starts, and the date at the foot of this page will change.

The law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over any dispute. If something goes wrong, please tell us first. We would much rather fix it than argue about it.

Contact

Email contact@onlinedesignuk.co.uk or call 01332 460064.

Last updated: October 2026.