Terms and Conditions
If you submit an application to use any of the services offered by Aardstorm.com ('this site'), you will be deemed to have accepted the terms and conditions described here.
General
Copyright
By submitting text or pictures for us to use in implementing your commissioned service(s), by whatever means, you are asserting that you own or have obtained sufficient license to the copyright in those materials to authorise us to use and/or publish them in the way that you have instructed us to do. You thereby agree to indemnify us against any breach of copyright that may arise from our use in this way of the materials you supply.
We normally retain the copyright in all of our work. Our standard license will allow you to use and/or copy our work within your own organisation, and supply it to others without charge except for the purpose of further modification. Unless otherwise agreed, you may not therefore sell or modify our work without our consent.
Quotation and Delivery
When you commission us to perform a service, we will endeavour to deliver that service in accordance with your requirements, as specified in our quotation. Where our quotation contains options, we expect you to specify which options you require when placing your order.
Where our fees are based on time taken to implement a service, then the amount you will pay will be based on our estimate, not the actual time taken. The fees set out in our quotation are therefore fixed, and will not vary if we take more or less time than expected to complete your service. This is, however, subject to there being no change in your requirements.
If you change your requirements from those set out in our quotation while we are working on your service, and the change is significant enough to require a change in our fees, then we will provide you with another quotation with revised fees. We will stop working on any aspect of your service affected by your change, until we receive confirmation from you that you accept our revised quotation.
Our quotation will contain a schedule that specifies when you can expect delivery of our services to you. While we will make every effort to deliver our services to you on time, we cannot guarantee to do so. Our ability to provide timely delivery may depend on external factors beyond our control, such as delivery of information or materials from yourselves or a third party, or receipt of your approval or selection between alternatives.
Payment of Fees
By commissioning us to perform a service, you agree to pay the deposit required for that service. We will not start work until we have received your deposit.
You agree to pay in full our fees for our services within 30 days of our invoice. We will not complete your commissioned service(s) until we receive your payment.
Where we contract with a third party on your behalf to supply part of our service to you, and the fees are payable by you through us (eg. licensing fees, printing service fees, photo shoot location fees, etc.), then these fees will be payable in advance; we will not commission any service from a third party until we receive the appropriate fees from you.
Where our service to you takes the form of a subscription (eg. our website hosting and management service), you will be notified by us that renewal of your service subscription is due approximately 30 days before your current service period expires. If you pay your renewal fees in full by the expiry date, your service(s) will be maintained without interruption. If you fail to renew your subscription by this date, your service will be suspended (eg. your website will be removed from our server) until we receive your payment. .
Cancellation
If you cancel your order for our non-subscription services at any point between payment of your deposit, and final payment, then you will still have to pay our fees for work we have already done. If we have completed 90% or more of the work, then the full fee will be due, otherwise and additional cancellation fee of 10% will also apply. If the total fee due is less than the deposit you have already paid to us, then you will receive a refund for the balance. Otherwise, we will invoice your for the remaining fees due. There will be no refund of third party fees you have already paid to us, unless we have not yet committed to paying those fees to the third party. In this case, any unused third party fees will be added to your deposit when calculating any refund or further fees due.
No refund will be due if you cancel your order for our subscription services at any time during your current subscription period. This includes any unused 'update unit's' you may have purchased.
Updates and Corrections
You will normally be given the opportunity to check and approve our work for you, or make the final selection from a number of alternatives, prior to final delivery. Any errors or omissions you detect in our work at this point will be corrected free of charge, unless they were already present in materials supplied to us. After this, any further corrections will attract further fees, especially if further copies are required. We will provide a quotation for these fees on request, and will require payment before the corrections are implemented.
Privacy
When you apply to use, or request a quotation for, any of our services through this site, you must supply contact information in the form of your name, (ie. person to contact, not business name), e-mail address, postal address, and (optionally) telephone number and compnay name. We will only use this information to contact you about your requested services. We will not voluntarily supply this information to any other party, unless legally required to do so.
The customer contact information you supply to us for inclusion in your website, or other published material, to allow your potential customers to contact you directly, will also only be used for that purpose. We will not voluntarily supply it to any other party, unless legally required to do so.
Any information or materials that you supply to us for use in providing our service to you will not be used, copied, published, or supplied to a third party in any way other than as required in providing the agreed service, unless we are legally required to do so. We will return supplied materials to you only if you also supply adequate return postage, otherwise we will destroy them when no longer required.
Website Design Service
We will endeavour to protect your customer contact information (eg. the e-mail address you provide for your potential customers to contact you), published by us on your website, from abuse by other parties such as spammers. However, we accept no liability for any losses or inconvenience that may arise from any failure in this respect. We reserve the right to change the techniques we use to acheive this at any time.
Website Hosting and Management Service
Where you elect to use our shared hosting service, then you agree to allow us to move your site to another of our servers, if the traffic to your site justifies it. In extreme cases, this includes moving it to a dedicated server of its own, in which case the higher fees for our dedicated hosting service will become payable for the remainder of your subscription period. We will endeavour to give you as much notice as possible of any move. We will organise any move of your site to a different server to minimise disruption to users of your site, although we do not accept any liability for losses incurred during the move.
While your site is hosted on our servers, we will endeavour to protect it from abuse or corruption by third parties. Should such corruption occur, then we will restore your site to normal as quickly as we can, at no further charge to you. We do not, however, accept any liability for losses incurred while your site is not operating normally. This includes any periods of non-availability of your site caused by failure of our suppliers.
Where we supply you with one or more mailboxes for e-mail associated with your website, then, for the lifetime of this feature being part of our hosting service to you, you agree to either supply us with a valid e-mail address to which received mail can be forwarded, or monitor the mailbox(es) yourself frequently enough to avoid a build-up of undelivered mail on our server. You also agree to not use these mailboxes to send illegal, obscene, offensive or unsolicited 'spam' e-mails to others.
While we will endeavour to protect the e-mail mailbox(es) provided with your website from abuse by others, we cannot guarantee complete success in this respect. We also cannot guarantee that any e-mails you receive through your mailbox(es) will be free of viruses or other malicious content - it is up to you protect yourself by checking all received e-mails. We do not accept any liability for losses incurred as a result of your receipt of malicious or other e-mails, abuse of your mailbox(es), or lack of availability of your mail facility while it is repaired by ourselves or our supplier.
Research Service
When you commission us to locate information for you, we will attempt to do so in the quantity and quality that you require. We cannot, however, guarantee to do so; the information you require may not be publicly available. In this event, your deposit will not be refunded, but the balance of our research fees will be waived.
Picture Location Service
When you commission us to locate pictures for you, we will attempt to do so in the quantity and quality that you require. We cannot, however, guarantee to do so; the pictures you require may not be available with appropriate licensing terms. In this event, your deposit will not be refunded, but the balance of our picture location fees will be waived.
Where we license one or more pictures on your behalf, either for use by ourselves in providing another service to you, or for supply to you or a third party, then you also agree to abide by all terms and conditions in that license. You may not copy, use or supply to a thrird party such pictures in any way other than as specified in the associated license.
Photography Service
Where you commission us to take photographs either at a location or of property that is not owned by you, or of people that are not part of your organisation, and you do not also commission us to obtain the necessary permission from those third parties, then you thereby agree to obtain the necessary permission yourself, and indemnify us against any liability, charges or penalties that may arise from our taking or using those photographs. We will, however, expect to see evidence that such permission has been obtained prior to our arrival at the shoot.