James Burgess

This is quite interesting…

Well, these past couple of weeks I’ve had some contract terms to negotiate and it’s a long old process. The problem lies, as it always does, with liability.

Now, companies have their contracts drawn up by solicitors for a reason - but why do they always have to be so problematic? I’ve been presented, recently, with a contract that holds me liable for anything and everything the employer/contractor could wish to make a fuss about - and I think that’s an unacceptable ground for employers/contractors to try and get away with in the first place. Hiring people has always been a liability, and it always will be - but it’s part of the risk you take to get a job done. Unfortunately, that form of dealing seems to have changed a lot from what one may refer to as ‘the good old days’ of contracts and employment.

I’m not in a situation where I can afford (with my company’s income), to pay for liabilities insurance - and so anything that holds me liable for something outside of my control is strictly not possible for me. Trying to get me to sign a piece of paper that is signing away my support, my savings, my property and my very livelihood to someone’s word that “we’ll never do anything about it” is just not holding water with me.

The same sort of situation occurred with some accommodation I was supposed to be moving into last year (that fell through) - the landlord was planning on even holding the tenants liable for damage he caused to his and their property whilst in the house (which he was also allowed to do at any time of day or night, without warning).

How on earth do people get away with this kind of stuff? Or, rather, why do so many people not even bother to read contract terms thoroughly before legally agreeing to them? How about you? Have you had any awkward contracts to work through?

In my downtime from studying for the current exam season, I decided to have a crack at re-designing my portfolio website. I’m really happy with the result - and the actual design only took about an hour and a half to come up with and put into practice.

Then I just couldn’t resist porting it to this blog…

I think they’ve both turned out really nicely - the blog isn’t 800×600 friendly (like the portfolio is), but then I don’t really expect much of today’s web-viewing population to be running 800×600 - and if they are, they’re probably not interested in a web designer/developer or in a technical blog… (even though that’s severely grating on me as I’ve been reading Steve Krug’s book on usability [sample chapter]).

So, take a look around the portfolio and here, and let me know what you think. The blog template is a bit of a work in progress, and there may be small areas I haven’t noticed and haven’t ‘themed’ properly (odd font sizes, etc) - but that’s what you get for having a counter-intuitive and overly-complicated templating system… as opposed to something simple.