Removing a clients website for non-payment. Need advice.

[iany]

We have had similar problems with one of our clients. Fortunately we had also had the hosting and just posted a page saying that the site was unavailable - no graphics no nothing.

Clearly legal positions differ from country to country, but if they haven't paid the bills they cannot expect the site to be there. Even if they have paid part of the fee - which is for the expertise as well as the design. My sympathies are with you on this as it is an unfortunate fact of life that many companies do not appreciate that fees are not just based on time, they are for experience and expertise. Just hang on, I would doubt that they can make it stick.

In our case they even had the audacity to have another print company ask our design partners for the logo for the stationery. Needless to say they were told in polite terms where to go.

Good luck

Ian

[destin-ation]

I removed a clients website from the internet for non-payment of website design service after all efforts to be paid was exhausted and the account was several months past due (by the way…they are doing this to other businesses in town). Now…the client is claiming they are turning this over to their lawyer….claiming we severely harmed their business. The restaurant website was down for less than 24 hours. We reinstalled the website, after they paid less than ½ the amount due. We gave them a 30 day extension on the remaining amount due. Now…they refuse to pay the remaining amount and they are threatening to sue us. This is getting ugly. Has anyone else…ever had to pull down a clients website due to non-payment? If so, what was the outcome? If anyone can share their experience, I’m sure we could all learn from this. Are there any general website ethics rules about having to pull down a website? Any advice on this issue would be appreciated. The client still owes me $1,200 and refuses to pay. I’ve been designing websites for over 10 years and I have never had to go to the extreme of removing a clients website. I could use a little advice from fellow web designers.

Wow…thank you….everyone for your input. There is some great advice about contracts that we will be implementing. Hope everyone takes the time to read and make adjustments to their contract so that you do not end up in my situation. We did everything we could to get paid. We even warned them and they tried to lock us out of their website. It’s never fun getting a email saying….you are going to get sued and you have to defend yourself. This is a client that spend big bucks…and they can’t pay a small vendor like me.

[SemAdvance]

Wow…thank you….everyone for your input. There is some great advice about contracts that we will be implementing. Hope everyone takes the time to read and make adjustments to their contract so that you do not end up in my situation. We did everything we could to get paid. We even warned them and they tried to lock us out of their website. It’s never fun getting a email saying….you are going to get sued and you have to defend yourself. This is a client that spend big bucks…and they can’t pay a small vendor like me.

People will pay their car payments for years and then fall behind.

If they do not try to make up the payments they are behind the Repo man comes and takes their car.

If the client bad mouths you all you need to do is start answering any questions with "she did not pay her bill after falling behind several months and our giving her every opportunity to rectify the situation"

It would be one thing for her to bad mouth you if the service was bad but being a bad credit risk will hurt her reputation more than she can damage yours.

I would send her a cease & desist letter and tell her all correspondence should be sent to your lawyer.

Good luck!

[langsor]

This doesn't help you now, but I once took on a client that seemed a little sketchy to me; however, I still took them on.

What I did, knowing that they controlled the server and could potentially lock me out after I had uploaded content to their site, was to write a secure script (Md5 login protected) with PHP that would recursively delete all files in their website. Then I backed up their website, uploaded all files, and added the script into the mix.

I don't know if this was legal, but I do know that if they choose not to pay me and lock me out instead, I could still take (reversible) action. Banking on the fact that most clients aren't tech-savvy enough to back up their own server as well. So even if the hosting service backed them up, it would at least create a disruption in their service.

Anyway, thought I'd share.

[jannmirch]

From a design standpoint, the design is YOURS until the client pays for it. By extension, I would think new files/coding would remain yours until payment.

Not sure how this plays out with an existing client but I just had my contract reviewed (for the first time) with an attorney (I'm in New York). I've not had any significant problems collecting from clients, but having this kind of info clarified is helpful. I did have one client, for whom I did some subcontracting work. When she failed to pay, I took her to small claims court in her town. Once I filed the paper work, she became very responsive to my request for prompt payment. And I included in my claim, the original amount owed, the filing fees I paid and my hourly rate times the number of hours I expected to be in court. She ultimately contacted me and paid the original amount plus my court fees; we didn't go to court so I let it go at that. Along the lines of what SEM was saying, I think her fear of getting a reputation as a deadbeat helped speed the process.

Do let us know what happens. As you say, any of us could find ourselves in a similar situation.

[CraigAllen]

Wow this is a timely thread, as I am in the exact same boat. A client I've done work with for years, web design and hosting, who has always been very happy with my work and always paid on time... I did some work at his office while he walked me through what he wanted to change and so forth, spent three hours there, he said he liked it, I went back to my office and spent two more hours on finishing up the changes from the notes I'd made during my onsite visit...

Sent out the bill and never got a payment. The next month his quarterly hosting is due, so the bill bill goes out with that and the past due notice and late fee charge, no payment or contact from him. Third month I sent out the bill with another late fee and a "site suspension warning" as per my tos...

Near the end of the billing period when his site was due to be suspended he emails me and tells me that he hasn't contacted me because of the sensitive nature of what he needs to say made it difficult to put into words. His email states that he values our professional relationship and has always enjoyed working with me, but is dissatisfied with the quality of my work and has a friend who knows "how to do websites" and that he has learned some things himself despite my apparently telling him he couldn't do updates without Dreamweaver (not true, I told him that DW was the only wysiwyg editor I would be able to offer support and advice in using since it's what I use, not that he couldn't use anything but that)... his friend has polished up the site quite a bit and I should look at the changes he's made, and oh by the way could he take me to coffee to discuss the matter.

I emailed him back and thanked him for the offer but told him that if he was dissatisfied with my work he should have told me when I was actually doing it as he looked on and advised, that when I left he seemed quite satisfied with it, and that if he wished to protest that portion of the bill he needed to still pay the hosting amount and send me a letter explaining why he was contesting the rest of it. I made it clear that I had never said he couldn't do anything to the site without DW, but that's the only one I could offer support and advice for.

Well, a couple weeks later he sent enough to cover the hosting, but no dispute letter. Time has passed and he has gotten 90 days behind again so per the last bill and suspension notice I sent him, if I don't have payment in full by the 14th of next month his site will be suspended and his account will be referred to collections.

[seo4china]

Our terms for web design (when it includes hosting) are quite simple:
-We start the work after receiving a down payment (30~50% on average depending of client and size of project).
-Once site is done we upload to a test server (folder on our website) for final confirmation by client.
-AFTER balance is received in full we upload site under client own domain.
All this is documented in the contract we sign prior to starting anything.
So far we have never had any issue with accounts payable...

[fiddler]

I design websites - and host as a reseller via Host Gator. While I do not have a contract that I make clients sign, I do have my policies listed on my website, and all my invoices clearly itemize all work done to specifications, state when payment is due, and what will be charged for bounced checks.

I currently have a client that owes me $1200. Here's the scenario:
When he was many months past due, and after many (documented) phone calls with him promising payment, I turned him over to a collection agency (which is also a client, ironically). The collection agent had the case for 1 month, then turned it back over to me, advising me to get a lawyer and take him to small claims court. The lawyer I got was also a client and while I paid court costs up front, I traded services with my lawyer to go after the bad debt. We went to court, the bad debt client never showed and I won. That was 1 year ago. Of course I never collected a dime from the bad debt so far, but the lawyer has now called the judge and I am in the process of shelling out another $300 (which will be added to the original debt) to hire a constable to seize assets until the debt is satisfied. The bad debt client is out of business, but because I took action before he folded, I can still collect my money, even if it is in assets. This is Pennsylvania law, btw.

Oh, and I did shut down his website when I contacted the collection agency. The bad debt client's response to that was to hire another "webmaster" to take over the account. This webmaster became abusive on the phone when I explained to him I was not giving him any info for the website (user names/passwords, etc) until I was paid what I was owed. He threatened to "ruin me" just before I hung up on him (for the third time). His ultimate response was to take my domain name as dot-net and slander me. My lawyer had a good time with him, as well, and the slanderous site was taken down.

I meet with the judge this week to hire the constable. It's been a 1 1/2 long process, but I think I will eventually get some of my money (although not my time) back on all this.

[mjtaylor]

My agreements state that all invoices are due upon receipt and spell out late charges. I don't specify that a site will be taken down in the contract, but when an invoice is well overdue, I send a polite email to let them know that they are in arrears and that the consequences will be the removal of the site. I give them a deadline. I also explain that there can be (*can* be) negative consequences of the search engines not finding their site when spidered. Since they have usually spent a good deal of money with me to optimize their site, that usually helps them get the check book out. Sometimes I do have to take a site down. That rarely lasts more than a day. I've never had any legal repercussions, and I don't expect any. I am sorry to hear about yours.

[Clarrie]

We've had occasional problems with this sort of thing in the past, and it's certainly been worse in the last eighteen months. Although this might smack of horses bolting and stable doors it's worth making sure your contract terms include copyright retention (we retain copyright until we receive payment in full) and right to suspend service clauses. If you don't have them, it can make your rights unclear (depends on local law).

In the UK there's a general principle of going to court with "clean hands" - that is your claim stands a better chance if you have fulfilled your obligations under the contract - if you don't have a suspension clause for example, it could damage your claim if you suspend access to the site, as the other side can argue that by removing the site you are in breach. Conversely, if they want to argue poor quality work, they have to pay, then sue for reimbursement. Of course the position might be different in Florida, so you need to get advice from a lawyer.

Another thing to remember is that there's no goodwill left in this relationship - if they've got financial problems and there's goodwill you can generally come to an arrangement over spreading payments over several months (had to do it a couple of times over the last year), but once things reach the point of threats and lawyers then that's it and you need to do likewise, and put behind you that you might once have had a friendly relationship with your client. They've broken trust by their actions, so you don't owe them any false loyalty, and you almost certainly don't want to do business with them again.

At the end of the day you have to make the hard-nosed decision of either going to law yourself (with all that entails) or writing off the outstanding amount. Over the last seven years I've had to turn to the law three times - in each case they were people who just didn't want to pay the last bit of what they owed and thought we'd just write it off for the sake of the "relationship". None of them tried to argue that we'd done a bad job, they just turned out to be rogues who wanted to give themselves a bit of my money for free. Once we'd made it clear that we were prepared to go to court if need be, they all ended up paying up, so its worth not letting them intimidate you into letting it drop if you have a case.