The following sets out the Terms and Conditions for any Website Design or Re-Design carried out by BATTLE VA, herein referred to as "Designer". The organisation, company or individual for whom the Work is to be carried out, hereinafter referred to as "Client". Whereas the Client wishes Consultant to create certain Work, described in their Design brief to be submitted in writing to the Consultant; and whereas Consultant wishes to create such Work.

By assigning Work to the Designer, the Client agrees to be bound by the following provisions:

DURATION: Client and Consultant are to agree a date at which point all Work is expected to be completed. Extensions may be requested by Designer, and granted or denied by the Client.

PAYMENT: Client agrees to pay Designer the amount quoted for Work to be carried out. A 50% deposit payment is required before any commencement of Work. Designer may raise invoices at various stages of Work which shall be payable within 7 days. Delays in payment will incur delay in completion of Work accordingly. The final payment shall be due upon notification that Work is completed and before website is released to Client.

Payments are to be made by BACS Transfer to Designer's Account at National Westminster Bank, Bank Code 60-02-07, Account No. 59581271.

ADDITIONAL PAYMENT: Any Work the Client wishes Consultant to create, which is not specified in the original design brief will be considered as additional Work. Such Work shall require additional payment of fees at the standard hourly rate.

EXPENSES: Client agrees to reimburse Consultant for any of the following expenses necessary in completion of the Work: (e.g. Fonts, Messengers, Proofs, Props, Research, Shipping, Software, Stock photography, Web address, Hosting, Travel)

CLIENT RESPONSIBILITIES: Client agrees to provide Designer with all content information, artwork, images, webnames and any other materials required so that the Work may be completed on time and to Client's satisfaction. The Client should be aware that failure to submit required information or materials or late payments may cause subsequent delays in the production. Client delays could result in significant delays in delivery of finished Work. 

Unless otherwise agreed in writing, content and images for initial static pages -number of static pages to be agreed- must be supplied to the Designer in web-ready format; for shopping carts initial product details and images for up to 20 products will be loaded and must be supplied to the Designer in web-ready format; each product variation is regarded as a separate product. If bulk loading of products is required that will incur additional costs. The following formats are accepted by the Designer: for images jpg or png, for content MS Word or equivalent, for spreadsheets MS Excel.

DESIGNER RESPONSIBILITIES: Designer will make every effort to meet agreed upon due dates and to keep Client informed of progress.

CONFIDENTIALITY: Client and Designer agree to discuss the Work listed above with only one another and any other agreed upon parties. Such information shall be so identified in writing at the time of its transmittal, and shall be safeguarded and not disclosed to third parties by the receiving party.  Confidential information shall not include information that (a) is already known to the party to which it is disclosed;   (b) is or becomes part of the public domain without breach of this Agreement;  (c) is obtained from third parties, which have no obligations to keep confidential to the parties to this Agreement.

RIGHTS: Rights, including copyright, ownership, and publishing rights, to this Work belong to Designer as of the date of commencement of Work until notice of completion and payment of Designer's fees, upon which point they will transfer to Client.

PERMISSIONS AND RELEASES: The Client agrees to indemnify and hold harmless Designer against any and all claims, costs, and expenses, including legal fees, due to materials included in the Work at the request of the Client for which no copyright permission or previous release was requested or uses which exceed the uses allowed pursuant to a permission or release.

TERMINATION: Either party may terminate this Agreement by giving 30 days' written notice to the other of such termination. In the event that Work is postponed or terminated at the request of the Client, Consultant shall have the right to bill pro rata for Work completed through the date of that request, while reserving all rights under this Agreement. If additional payment is due, this shall be payable within seven days of the Client's written notification to stop Work. In the event of termination, the Client shall also pay any expenses incurred by Consultant and the Consultant shall own all rights to the Work. The Client shall assume responsibility for all collection of legal fees necessitated by default in payment.

RELATIONSHIP: This Agreement does not imply any other relationship between Client and Designer. Any further Work requested by Client and/or suggested by Designer must be governed under a separate agreement.

All Provisions, Agreements, Terms and Conditions shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales.

According to W³Techs, as of the beginning of July 2013, 63% of all Joomla sites are running version 1.x. Of these, some 92% are running version 1.5. That works out to a rather large 58% of all Joomla sites running 1.5! The other 5% are mostly version 1.6 and 1.7. [Aside: if your site is one of those 5% please just upgrade now. It's not going to be that painful and you are a sitting duck for hackers. By "now" I mean stop reading this and go upgrade. Seriously.]

So why is the number so high? There are usually a long list of factors, and most of them are valid. Here are the ones I hear regularly:

• Simply porting the site is going to be a lot of work.
• We just did our site a few years ago and don't have the budget for it.
• Things we rely upon didn't make it to 2.5.
• We hate change.
• The site is outdated; if we're going to update it we want to redesign it and that's a big job.
• There's no reason to upgrade (AKA "if it ain't broke, don't fix it").
• You're only telling me I need to upgrade because you want more business.

Every web site is different, so each of the reasons above can be more or less relevant depending on circumstances. At one end of the spectrum is the hobby site that generates no revenue, and doesn't have much traffic. A site that could be off line for a few weeks or months and not suffer. I'm going to exclude them from this discussion.

For everyone else, the question to ask is "what's the cost of having my site suddenly go to an 'under construction' page?" What's the monetary value? What's the value of lost reputation? Take a serious look at your situation and try to come up with a reasonable number. Compare this with the cost of upgrading your site. If the numbers are close, it's probably a good idea to start budgeting. If the cost is significantly higher than upgrading, find the budget now because it's time to start planning!

Here's the key issue: the technologies that Joomla uses, most significantly PHP, are also changing over time. This chart illustrates the problem for Joomla 1.5:

To put it clearly: there is no currently supported version of PHP that will run Joomla 1.5! While that shouldn't be panic-inducing, it is not something to be ignored. There's a lot of code out there (not just Joomla) that will have problems running under PHP 5.4, and lots of hosting companies will continue to support it, including Abivia. But – and this is a big one – sooner or later your host is going to send out a notice saying that they're moving to PHP 5.4 or 5.5. Depending on the host, you're likely to get anywhere between a week to 90 days notice. Even at 90 days, that's a pretty tight timeline for a mid-range site, particularly if you want to throw in a redesign at the same time.

This problem is made particularly challenging by the fact that the PHP folks chose to stick with the same major version number, even though they made some major changes to the language. There are some hosts who are just now retiring PHP 4. This was made possible because hosts could run PHP 4 in parallel with PHP 5. By not making recent versions PHP 6 and PHP 7, this mechanism is no longer available. If a host wants to support 5.4, they have to drop support for 5.3 at the same time.

So put your finger on the calendar a month from today, whatever day you happen to be reading this. Imagine that at the same moment you're doing that, you get a notice from your host saying "PHP 5.3 will not longer supported after..." and substitute the date under your finger. If that makes you uncomfortable, then it's time to start planning your upgrade!

Talk to us now and get your website upto scratch.

Written by Alan Langford

Vitavia has been a major upgrade from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 3.

Lost Elements is a digital art E-commerce website designed in Joomla 3