With no Maintenance Contract are they right to charge for this?

[tessa]

I am a contract marketing specialist. I do have web design experience as I have been designing websites for small businesses and non profits for 3 years. I have a new client with a website they paid six figured for 3 years ago. They have no maint. contract. There are major problems with the site. I have been analyzing the last year, they charge a lot for all the little extras and the site was built with a custom contact management system that is very limited which means the client has to come to them a lot. There are things they could have easily done in house had it been set up right. Anyway, these problems I mentioned are related to the way the site was designed that is causing problems with the performance. I gave them a list of issues with the site that need to be fixed. (things I thought they should have known, I am not sure why they didn't recommend this stuff themselves) The are preparing a quote to fix it. My issues is this-should they be charging the client for this?? It isn't like we are asking them to add things are make design changes. I don't build sites of this magnitude but when I build a site, and something is wrong, I fix it no charge. The companies rationalization is that the site wasn't built for the things it is doing now. And I realize that technology has changed significantly in 3 years, but the issues that are happening are related to the way the designer set the site up. Honestly, I have never come across this situation because I have never seen a site that cost this much have this many problems. I have come across a lot of companies ripping people off and overcharging so I am extra cautious about this. I like the people there and feel they mean well and I wouldn't have trouble with them if they weren't so expensive. My issue is that they are charging Neiman Marcus rates when they are providing a Macy's service. At these rates they should know what is wrong and not have a marketing coordinator figuring out things that I feel are pretty obvious. I would like to know if they are justified to charge the client to fix these kinds of issues. Thanks!

[dreamst8]

Hi Tessa. Without knowing what was in the original contract and what the fixes are in relation to what was originally planned, it's hard to say whether they should charge or not. I built a musicplayer on a site I built for a client just a few days ago. There were problems causing the player to not function properly when navigated to from the intro page. It turned out to be an easy fix, but I didn't know that it would be, when i first went in to fix the problem. The point is that since I installed the player and it wasn't working properly, I had no intention of charging to fix it.

If these are the kinds of fixes your client's designers will be making, then they "shouldn't" charge. But if the fixes are more like "I wanted these things this way before, but now I don't like how they function and want to go a different direction", you are looking at justifiable charges. If these things were approved when they were first put on the site and they still work the exact same way as they did back then, they wouldn't be fixes, they would be changes. Changes cost.

Now with all of that said --- with no maintenance contract, it makes it that much harder to nail down what should and shouldn't be paid for. It might be a good idea to suggest to your client that when paying such a large sum of money for ANY service, a written contract should be in place. This may not help them in this current situation, but it is definitely a business practice they should have adopted when they first started doing business. But since it wasn't, it should be from this moment forward.