On this page
Who these terms are with
These terms are between you and Hamann Sites, operated by Malte Hamann in Madison, South Dakota, USA — referred to below as “I” or “me”. You can reach me at malte@hamannsites.com or (605) 291-5949.
They cover two things: using this website, and the work I do if you hire me. Where I send you a written quote or agreement for a specific project, that document wins over anything on this page if the two disagree.
Using this site
You are welcome to read it, and to get in touch. Please do not scrape it, copy the design wholesale, or use the contact form to send marketing — I read every inquiry myself and unsolicited pitches waste both our time.
Nothing on this site is a binding offer. Prices and descriptions are what I normally charge and normally do; a contract exists between us only once we have both agreed a specific piece of work.
The work
A standard build is a custom-designed, custom-written website for one business: as many pages as the business needs, a contact form, click-to-call, responsive down to 320px wide, on-page SEO and structured data, and launch onto hosting with a domain and SSL.
Things that are genuinely bigger jobs — online ordering, booking systems, multiple locations, anything involving payments or customer accounts — are not part of a standard build. They get their own fixed price, agreed before anything is built.
Price and payment
A standard build is $800, once. There is no deposit and no installment plan, and you owe nothing while I am building it.
The sequence is deliberately in this order:
- We talk about the business, usually for about half an hour, at no cost.
- I build the site. You are not billed for this and you have committed to nothing.
- I walk you through the finished site. If it is not what you wanted, you say so and you pay nothing.
- If you want it, that is when you pay, and that is the first money that changes hands.
Invoices are due within 14 days unless we agree otherwise in writing. Prices exclude any sales tax that may apply; where it does apply, it is shown separately on the invoice.
Refunds and cancellation
Before you pay
You can walk away at any point before you pay, for any reason or none, and you will not be invoiced. That is the whole point of building first and billing second — there is nothing to refund because there is nothing to get back.
After you pay
Once you have seen the finished site, approved it and paid, the build fee is non-refundable — the work has been done and handed over. What you get instead is this: if something I built is broken or does not do what I said it would, tell me and I will fix it at no charge. That obligation does not expire on a date.
And if I never deliver a site at all, there is nothing to refund — because you will not have paid anything.
The care plan
The $50/month care plan can be canceled in any month, with no notice period and no exit fee. Canceling stops the next payment; the month you have already paid for runs to its end, and part-months are not refunded. Nothing switches off when you cancel — the site stays online and stays yours.
Domain and hosting
These are billed to you directly by the provider, not by me, so their refund terms apply and not mine. I do not mark them up.
The care plan
Entirely optional. Turn it down and the site is still yours, still online, and nothing expires. If you take it, it covers content and photo updates, backups and uptime monitoring, security and broken-link checks, and priority on changes and questions.
It does not cover building new sections, new functionality, or a redesign. Those are quoted separately at a fixed price before I start.
Domain and hosting
I will set up the domain, hosting, SSL and email routing for you, in accounts registered in your name, with you as the account holder. They typically cost a few dollars a month and are billed to you directly at cost — I take no commission and add no markup.
Because the accounts are yours, the hosting company’s terms and uptime commitments are between you and them. I will help you deal with them, but I cannot promise a service that is not mine to provide.
What I need from you
Your logo if you have one, any photographs worth using, your services and prices, and about half an hour on the phone. If you have not written the text, I will draft it and you correct it.
When you send me text, photographs or a logo, you are confirming that you own them or have permission to use them, and that I can put them on your site. If a photograph turns out to be someone else’s, that is a problem I have no way of detecting and no way of fixing, so it has to rest with you. If you are not sure where an image came from, tell me and I will find one we can properly license.
Late material is the single most common reason a build slips. I will chase you for it.
Timelines
A straightforward site is usually two to three days from the first call to something you can look at, and up to about a week for a bigger job. Under the care plan, changes are usually live within a few working days.
These are honest estimates based on how the work normally goes — they are not guarantees, and the clock does not start until I have your text and images. The same applies to the performance figures quoted on the site: they are targets I build toward, measured on a mid-range phone, and the real number depends on the images and the hosting you end up with.
Who owns what
When the invoice is paid, the site is yours: the source code, the files, the domain, the hosting account, the content. Outright, with no license back to me and no lock-in. If you want to hand it to another developer a week later, you can, and I will help with the handover.
Two small exceptions, which are normal and do not limit what you can do with your site:
- Anything that was already mine before the project — general techniques, snippets and patterns I reuse across builds — stays mine, and you get an unrestricted license to use it as part of your site.
- Third-party components such as open-source typefaces stay under their own licenses.
Unless you ask me not to, I may show your finished site as an example of my work.
The designs shown on this site
The three website layouts in the header of the home page are demonstration designs I drew for this page. The businesses in them — their names, their text, their “clients” — are invented. They are there to show the range of directions I design in, and they are not client projects, not case studies, and not a claim that those businesses exist or that I have worked for them.
If any of the invented names happens to match a real business, that is coincidence and not an association, and I will change it if someone tells me.
Accessibility
I build to WCAG 2.1 Level AA as a working standard: color contrast, keyboard navigation, labeled form fields, text that scales. I aim to meet it and I test for it.
What I cannot do is certify a site as permanently compliant, because compliance depends on what goes into it after launch as much as on how it was built. If you add pages, images without alt text, or third-party widgets, that can change. If accessibility is a legal requirement for your organization rather than a preference, say so at the start — it changes how we scope the work, and you should get your own advice on what standard applies to you.
Found a barrier on a site I built, including this one? Tell me and I will fix it.
Liability
I will do this work with reasonable care and skill, and I will fix anything I got wrong.
What I cannot carry is unlimited downstream risk. Except where the law does not allow it to be limited, my total liability for any claim connected to a project is capped at the fees you paid me for that project, and I am not liable for lost profits, lost business, lost data or other indirect losses. I am also not responsible for services I do not provide — hosting outages, domain registry problems, or a third-party service changing its terms.
Nothing here limits liability for fraud, or for anything else the law says cannot be limited.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of South Dakota, and any dispute goes to the courts of South Dakota. If some part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.
Before it gets anywhere near that, please just call me. Almost everything is fixable with a phone call.
Changes
I may update these terms. The version that applies to your project is the one in force when we agreed the work, and the “last updated” date at the top tells you which that is. Changes are not applied backwards to work already agreed.