Tim Houghton

Mission accomplished! They've paid in full, woohoo! I've restored the site to it's original state and handed over the admin credentials. I might as well apologise now to all my future clients, I'm going to be a lot more suspicious

In my defence the client had paid their bills without fail for the last 4 years so I give them some leeway! They were slow payers (2 months or more), but reliable until now. They've always paid by cheque as well. That's an interesting comparison about payments methods too, I think since I went freelance (12 years and counting) only about a quarter of payments have been by bacs, the rest were with cheques. To be honest I quite like receiving cheques in the post Once I noticed payment was late I started sending them monthly statements, it was only after the 3rd or 4th one that I started emailing them asking about it. We've never had a telephone relationship, it's always been email (I've never even met them). I do normally take a 1/3 deposit up front, 1/3 on delivery, and 1/3 after going live. This job however started out as only a day or so of work to be paid at my hourly rate, but there was a whole sequence of 'oh just one more thing'. Good point about wget too. This is a wordpress site so hopefully the database will make it not worthwhile to recreate the site in that way. I know that's a job I wouldn't particularly want! About keeping hosting in-house ... I have mixed feelings about this. I usually host my sites but I don't insist on it. Quite often the customer will have bought hosting somewhere else, tried to set up a site with Wix or the boss's nephew or something similar, and then come to me when it all goes wrong. Also I know of some at least one local firm of 'web designers' who are borderline criminal about insisting on hosting. They trick customers into signing over ownership of the domain ("the site will only work if the domain name and the site on our servers" is one line they use), produce a site running the default Joomla theme, charge a fortune for hosting, offer 'custom site designs' for an outrageous price, and make it very difficult to leave. I have one client who is a refugee from them, it took us months to get the domain name back. So I generally like the idea of keeping it in-house, but I think insisting on it can sometimes look bad.

Thanks for that cheery note On the plus side I suppose if they brief counsel I'll know they were lying about not having any money!

Thanks for all the input folks! I've spoken to them now. They aren't happy with my threat to remove the work that hasn't been paid for, but have said they will pay the full amount. However they have said that the guy who signs the cheques is in hospital so cannot pay until next Monday. This sounded pretty suspicious to me, and I'm worried that they will use this week to find another developer and lock me out. So ... possibly unwisely ... I have removed the whole website from their server, reinstated it on one of my servers, and then put the whole thing back in an iFrame on their server. It looks identical except the links have different domain names. I'm taking a bit of a gamble that they won't notice! If my next post is from prison I hope some of you will come visit!

Huh, ok, this is a interesting take on it. My worry is that they have paid in full for the version of the website that was there 12 months ago. If I was to remove the stuff they haven't paid for, do you think I would be obliged to reinstate the old website (this would take at least an hour or two, which obviously I won't be paid for haha)?

Hey thanks for the fast reply! Disabling everything is my preferred option, but I wonder if it's legal? Wouldn't I be making unauthorised changes to their website? The site is hosted by a UK web host, and the charity is their customer. I just have the charity's login and password. Same situation with their domain name. So I'm slightly worried I would be making an empty threat. They could just brief another web developer, give him the logins and password, and s/he could simply undo anything I did. I should also add that I have trouble accepting their story about financial difficulty. They have an office overseas as well (in an extremely impoverished part of the world, so costs are probably very low), and are allegedly reducing their London office to just a small liaison office (but even a small office in London still costs plenty of money, right?!)

Hello! I'm looking for some advice. Around 5 years ago I built a website for a registered charity here in the UK. It was designed by someone else, I built it. In the years since I have done many little jobs for them, setting up their email on Google Apps, adding/removing email accounts, making site banners, adding/removing users from the CMS, little IT support jobs like that. They always paid their bills. We've never had a formal contract. I charge them my standard hourly rate for everything. Around 12 months ago they wanted to overhaul/modernize some aspects of the site. I went ahead and did the work and eventually submitted an invoice of around £1000. After several months the invoice still hadn't been paid, so I started sending monthly statements. This week (10 months after the initial invoice) I had a call from the charity. They gave me a whole bunch of sob story stuff which I didn't really understand (all about, and I quote, "internal sabotage" and "treachery" by former employees). They now want to only pay half of the invoice because of financial difficulty. I suggested they pay half now, and the balance in installments. They refused, saying I could accept half now or nothing at all. I should also add that as recently as June this year they were asking me to do little extra IT jobs (in June I set up a couple of new email accounts for them). I don't host the site, or the domain name, although I have the login details for both. I'm pretty sure the charity has no idea how to login to either of them, although they could probably find out just by phoning the hosting company and/or domain registrar (both UK companies). I am also the administrator of their Google Apps account (so I could disable their email if I wished). What should I do next? I was thinking about threatening to take the site offline, or posting a 'site on hold due to unpaid bills' message on it, but I don't know how legal that would be. Ditto for disabling their email. My other thought was taking them to small claims court, although I don't have the first clue how to go about it. Thank for any suggestions!

A client of mine is an email and blackberry junkie. I moved his email to Google Apps about 10 months ago, and he's already filled up his 7.6GB. He's the manager of a fairly well-known 80s band that still tours, so he sends and receives a lot of MP3s. I'm looking for suggestions for a truly unlimited IMAP email provider (a paid one). Can anyone suggest a good one, that won't complain once they notice he is storing ~10Gb of email per year? When googling the subject I found some mentions of Blue Host, who claim to offer unlimited storage and unlimited IMAP accounts, for some crazy low monthly fee of 7 bucks or something. Is this for real? To be honest I'd rather go for some dedicated email company, rather than using IMAP on a standard web hosting server (which in my experience isn't very reliable, perhaps I've been unlucky with lousy hosts). Thanks for any advice!

Thanks a million! You got me on the right track. They both seem to be 8 bit, but one of them is CMYK and one is RGB. That's what I get for relying on images provided by the inhouse designer. Where's the facepalm smiley when you need it?

Hi folks, I was hoping someone could shed some light on a strange problem I encountered this morning. Hopefully it is just some stupid mistake on my part What is the difference between these two images? Both of them appear to load fine in Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc (under OS X). However when I was testing in IE6 (on XP) and IE7 (on Win7) only the first image loads and the second image is a broken link. I cannot figure out why. I'm running XP and Win7 in VMWare on a Mac, if that makes any difference. http://www.ziwl.com/_wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/1375-5-+-SBC-noir-luxe.jpg http://www.ziwl.com/_wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/1375-5GS-+-1375TPS.jpg

Hello everyone. I've never registered at a forum specifically for web design before, although I do use lots of other forums. Unfortunately I was prompted to register because I have a problem I want help with but hopefully I may have something to contribute someday.