Trading Services for a Website Instead of Paying

A handshake instead of an invoice

A dentist offers a designer a year of family check-ups in return for a website. A caterer feeds a developer's office party. A contractor renovates a designer's kitchen and gets a site in exchange.

Trades like these are common between small businesses, especially when cash is tight on one side and the other side wants what the first one offers.

They often start well. The trouble usually arrives months later, when one side thinks the deal is finished and the other does not.

Almost always, the cause is that nothing was written down, because it did not feel like a sale.

What usually goes unwritten

• What the site includes: pages, features, photos and who writes the words.
• What each side is worth, in dollars.
• When it is finished, and who decides.
• Who owns the domain, the hosting and the design.
• What happens after launch, when something breaks or needs changing.
• What happens if either side stops halfway.

The fifth causes the most friction. A trade usually covers building the site, and both sides discover what they each assumed about support only when the first problem appears.

A trade still has a price

Put a dollar figure on each side, as if both were invoices: a website worth $4,000 for $4,000 of the other business's work at its normal rates.

The figure does three jobs. It sets the scope, since extra pages or a bigger renovation now visibly cost something. It shows when the trade is complete. And it gives both bookkeepers something to record.

Trades between businesses generally count as income for tax purposes too, at a fair value. Ask your accountant how to record yours before the work starts.

Paying clients come first

A trade carries no deadline that money would enforce. When either side gets busy, the paying customers are served first and the trade waits.

That is how a six-week website becomes a seven-month one, while the other half of the deal was delivered long ago.

Agree dates for each stage, as you would with any supplier, and agree what happens if they slip.

A short check every two weeks, with the next milestone named for each side, keeps both halves of the trade moving.

Who owns what

Register the domain in your business's name, in an account you control. The same goes for the hosting account and any themes, plugins, fonts or photos bought for the site.

Copyright in the design and the code generally stays with whoever created them unless it is assigned in writing. A paid project usually deals with that in its agreement; a handshake deals with nothing.

Make sure you will receive every login: the domain registrar, the hosting control panel, the site's administrator account and the email.

Ask for the original design files too, such as the logo and graphics in their editable form, so that another professional can pick up the work later.

A worked example

A koi pond builder with a crew of three agreed to build a backyard pond for a graphic designer in return for a new website. They shook hands over coffee.

The pond grew as it was built: a waterfall, then a larger filter, then lighting. The website grew too: a gallery, then a booking form for spring cleanouts, then a second version of the home page.

The site launched on the designer's hosting account, with the builder's domain moved into the designer's registrar account for convenience.

A year later the pond's pump failed and the designer expected a free repair. The same month the booking form stopped sending, and the designer, now busy with paying clients, took three weeks to reply.

When the builder wanted to move the site to hosting in the company's name, the domain turned out to be registered to the designer.

They settled it over a second coffee, this time with a list: the domain transferred to the builder's company, an hourly rate for future site work, a service rate for the pond, and invoices from both sides.

Support after launch

Every website needs some care once it is live: software updates, hosting and domain renewals, small changes and the occasional broken form.

Decide in advance whether the trade covers any of that, and for how long. A fixed period of corrections after launch, such as thirty days, is common in paid projects.

After that, agree a rate or a monthly plan, and who renews what. Otherwise the first problem becomes a favour, and favours are slow.

When one side stops

Businesses close, move, get busy or fall out. Write down what happens if the trade ends early.

The usual answer is that each side pays for what it has received, at the agreed values, and the work done so far is handed over with its files and logins.

That takes two sentences. Without them, a half-built website can sit on someone else's server indefinitely.

Writing it down

None of this needs a long contract. One or two pages signed by both sides cover it: the scope of each half, the values, the dates, who owns what, support after launch and what happens if it ends.

A web professional willing to trade should be glad to write it. A clear agreement protects them as much as you, and anyone experienced in website projects has most of the wording already.

The counter-case

Small trades between friends, a logo in return for a dinner, rarely need paperwork. The stakes are low and the scope is obvious.

Plenty of larger trades work out well too, especially between businesses that respect each other's time and keep talking.

But the bigger the job, the more it needs writing down. For anything as substantial as a website, treat the trade exactly like a paid project, with scope, values, ownership and support agreed before work starts.

Before you shake on it

1. Put a dollar value on both sides.
2. List the pages and features included.
3. Agree dates for each stage.
4. Register the domain in your business's name.
5. Collect every login at launch.
6. Agree support and rates after launch.
7. Sign one page that covers all of it.

Step four is the hardest to undo. A domain in someone else's account moves only with their cooperation, and a dispute about the trade is exactly when cooperation is scarce.

Keeping every account in the business's own name is also covered in the website after the business incorporates.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.