Website Paid for but Nothing Delivered

Hi,

I have asked someone I know who has extensive experience in web design and hosting etc and he has said the following:

"I've looked at the question and I need to ask more questions to consider an answer. 

1. Was the website ever proved to have worked successfully even in beta mode on the development server? 

2. Did the original proposal and/or invoice detail the name or type of software used in constructing the website? 

3. Were there any restrictions on the website or any of the software being moved to another company? 

OSdate appears to be current open source software designed to plug into dating websites and bulletin boards using other open source software such as PHP and MySQL .  There may be issues with interfacing with certain types of sites.  

Because of the delay in re-installing the website, changes would almost certainly need to be made to the website to ensure compatibility with the latest browsers (IE8, Firefox 3.6, Chrome etc)"

From a legal perspective this is obviously a contract law issue. What type of contract you had with the original developer will dictate to a certain extent what type of remedy may be available to you. I presume that one of terms of the contract was that when the website was designed you would own all of the content and the files for the website.

If you could let me have some more information I may be able to provide you with a further answer and the web designer that I know may be able to answer some of your technical questions.

Hi Gerard

This is copied from the tender document:

Core Website (£500): This is the main part of the website and includes
unlimited pages, images and all aspects of design. As with all out websites we
design the look and feel until the PYP is 100% happy with it.
· Content Management System (£200): This will allow you to change the web
pages of the PYP site from any web browser. This system is distinct from the
Profile DB, Messaging etc but will work hand in hand.
· Integrated Profile Database (£500): This is a bespoke database and the
associated front/back end administration. The database will host profiles with
varied fields and images and relational ratings aspects as managed by the
Ratings Engine (see below). This database can be of any complexity and will
have full searching, filtering and browsing from both front and back end.
· Ratings Engine (£300): The Ratings engine allows people to vote of attributes
of other profiles, for example, Pictures and descriptions. It will have a
comprehensive cheat prevention system (See our www.megapollster.com). We
also suggest it has a “brownie point” system to encourage voting and reward
amongst users.

Freeform Forums (£300?): Adding a forum isn’t very exciting. But there is lots
we can do in terms of social systems that take the forum concept further. For
example the Conversations on digg.com are unmoderated except by peers,
and it works very well. Or perhaps each profile could have its own forum which
acts as a blog and discussion area. There are many ways to innovate this
aspect Yadabyte would love to get involved.
· Blackbox Instant/Delayed Messaging (£300): The site will have a
comprehensive custom build messaging system. There will be no difference
between instant messages when two users are online and delayed when only
one user is online. The messaging system will be black-boxed, meaning that it
will be contained within the site and anonymous. If required we will also add
measures to prevent users swapping email addresses (we cannot guarantee
this system will never fail).
· One Years Unlimited Managed Hosting (Free): We will include the first years
hosting for free in the price. This will be on our fast and reliable backbone
server (UK Based).

You will own your website in totality. You can even sell it to some else.
All of our code and work on your site will be available under the modern and fair
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
You are free:
 to copy, distribute, display, and use the work
 to make derivative works
 to make commercial use of the work

I hope this helps.

Thank you.  Jamie

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for posting all of the information from the tender document on the forum, I will see if I can get someone to have a look at what you have written as unfortunately it does not mean a great deal to me.

As far as any contract dispute is concerned I believe that the relevant part of the document is the which details ownership of the website and content. Am I correct in thinking that you simply want to recover the website content or are you unhappy with the work that they did and therefore wish to recover some of the money that you paid to them?

Hi Gerard,

Thanks for this.  I wasnt really happy at the time as I was a novice in what I was trying to achieve, and if I could do it again id certainly get it right.

All I want is the website that they ended up with sending to me.  If they can't send this then I have basically paid £2.5k inc Vat for nothing.

I hope this helps.

Thanks

Jamie

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for clarifying everything. I'll ask someone else to have a look at teh technical aspects of the tender and then come back to you. Hopefully I will then be able to give you some guidance on what recourse you have in law.

Hi Jame,

This is what the web designer that I know has said

"The quotation implies that the site should be self contained, in that 
it could be taken elsewhere (and presumably still work).

However, there are still a lot of unknowns. All software needs the 
appropriate computer platform (PC, Linux, Mac etc.,) operating system 
(OS) as well as any plug-ins and licences.

Websites don't just plug and play especially when there are so many 
pieces of software interacting.  Can the questioner confirm that the 
website has been re-installed in the same computer environment?

In addition to this, (as pointed out earlier), web browsers can 
adversely effect the site, even not displaying it at all, although it 
is unlikely that is the problem in this case.

If the website was proven to have worked on the beta development 
server, then it should be possible to host it on another, similar 
server with the correct software, OS etc.

The original supplier should be able to issue an accurate 
specification for this which would be the starting point to re-launch 
the site"

This probably makes more sense to you than it does to me and obviously this relates more to the technical side of transferring the website.

It would appear to be clear from their initial contract / tender document that the original website and all the files associated with it belong to you. The original web designer that you employed should therefore provide you with all of the files or he is potentially breaching the contract.

If he fails to provide the files you may have to pursue him in the county court for breach of contract. I suggest that you liaise with the developer again and state that if they do not hand over all of the files you will have to instigate court proceedings against them for breach of contract.

I say based on the information that you have provided, is the tender document the actual contract that both parties ended up signing?

Hi Gerard, thank you ever so much for this.  The actual tender was just documentation of what I had paid for, nothing was ever signed I just paid based on the tender.

The files are clearly not in the files that he has sent across.  I have had this confirmed by 2 lots of developers.

If a contract wasn't signed, but there was a tender document does this then count as a contract?  The Invoice is generated at Phase 1 which is the same as the tender document.  Infact because OSdate covers alot of the stuff in the tender document it meant that alot of the work wasnt carried out on the original site.

The developer has gone back to his old team to see if any of them have the coding, but by his emails it doesnt sound like he will get it.

Hi Jamie,

I'm glad that you have found the information useful. If the files cannot be provided then I think that your next step is to write a formal letter to the original web designer and ask them to refund either all or part of the money that you paid to them because they have breached the contract by not being able to deliver the files to you as set out in the original tender document.

The original tender may well be viewed by a court to be the contract, a contract does not necessarily have to be signed to be legally binding.

I hope that this helps.