Avoid Horrendous Legal Problems By Having The Right Legal Pages On Your Website
Back in the day, it was fine to slap up a site and make all sorts of outrageous claims and bullshit promises.
Those days are long gone.
Fail to disclose you’re making an affiliate commission on a recommendation and your ass is grass!
There are so many regulations designed to tame the internet cowboys these days which we must all comply with.
I know an internet marketing guru from the old days who had an information product that looked good from first glance. However the FCC did some math and found it meant sooner or later somewhere down the chain you would need to sell the product to everyone on earth to make any money.
So, they figured it was bullshit that “anyone could do it”
They came up to his house one Saturday morning and confiscated everything, including the house.
How happy his wife was with this sudden turn of events.
Not very!
These days you don’t even need to do anything near as bad as my guru friend. You only need to make a claim about income without a disclaimer and you’re toast.
What about an EU privacy policy? If you don’t have one of those and you get any traffic from the EU…..yep, you’re up for a huge fine.
Ask Google about fines in the EU
If a ginormous outfit like Google can fall foul and cop billion dollar fines, then I’m pretty sure you can too.
Luckily, you do no tneed to hire an expensive fat lawyer in a 3 piece suit to write the legal docs you need for your website.
No, you do not need to pay thousands of dollars for counseling and drafting of disclosures and disclaimers.
Your mate, Don, has you covered….wait for it…..for free!
That’s right, use the same website legal pages I do for all my sites. To be transparent, I actually shelled out $60 and got their paid bundle of plugins and extensions.
You don’t need to do that, you can get the free plugin right here, right now and be safe as houses.
Take a look at the cool stuff you get in the free version of this pretty awesome plugin
- It has the more Legal Page Templates in the free version than any other free legal page plugin
- Most of the templates are written in such a way that you may not even need to edit anything, All important information is applied in the legal page automatically based on your website setting.
- All templates are extremely easy to customize. You can also add new website legal page templates if you choose.
- You can edit your legal pages in the built in editor the same way you edit normal WordPress page.s
- Set up is super easy and fast, no tech skills required.
- Very clean plugin and clean interface. NO shit.
- 100% compliant with WordPress
Anyway, you know you need to be covered otherwise, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself in hot water with a huge legal bill. You will probably face bankruptcy.
Don’t do that to yourself and your family. Go install the legal webpage plugin right now and sleep easy tonight.
The mandatory legal pages your site needs are as follows
- Privacy policies
- Copyright notices
- Terms and conditions of use
- Disclaimers
- Accessibility information
- Abuse or complaints contact information
- Trademarks
- Patents
- Corporate policies
Which Legal Pages Should Every Website Have?
As to which legal pages your website should have, it depends. A rule of thumb is you need at least a Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, Contact, Copyright and if you are making any claims you will need appropriate Disclaimers.
Privacy Policies
A privacy policy is one legal page that most sites that collect any type of information from customers should have. Your privacy policy should cover:
- The site’s use of cookies and other trackers
- How the collected personal information is used
- Who receives the collected information
- Contact information for erasing private information
- Information about third-party sites that might collect information (such as advertisers)
- Editing dates when the document is changed
Copyright Notices
It’s important to include a copyright notice on all of your web pages, but that doesn’t mean that you need a specific page for your copyright. Most sites that have a specific page about their copyright do so because the copyright is complicated, as in some of the material is owned by the site itself and some of it is owned by contributors.
Terms and Conditions of Use
Many websites include a “terms and conditions of use” document on their site. This explains the actions that are allowed and disallowed while using the website. You can include things like:
How to credit content and images from the site
Whether registration is required for posting content
The types of user-submitted content that are allowed and disallowed
Situations where user-submitted content is removed or changed
Keep in mind that while these terms and conditions can be popular with website owners, except in the case of registration, they are difficult to enforce. While taking images and content is a copyright violation, you have to find the culprits before you can go after them.
However, if your site uses a forum, blog comments, or other user-submitted content, you should strongly consider having a terms-of-use document.
If you make sales on your site, make sure you include a very strong and prominent Refund Policy. This will help you in the event a customer opens a dispute/chargeback via their bank or PayPal
Disclaimers
Disclaimers are super important if you are involved with Affiliate Marketing or making sales on your site. Especially if you are making claims to do with income potential of your products.
Complaints or Feedback Pages
While feedback pages aren’t legal pages, they can be useful for sites that have a lot of customer interaction. Feedback links help customers by giving them a place to complain before they go to a lawyer, thus reducing legal issues.
Patents, Trademarks, and Other Corporate Policies
If your website or company has relevant patents and trademarks, you should have a page that details them. If there are other corporate policies that you want your customers to know about, you should have pages for them as well.
Hopefully by now, you’re convinced your site needs the protection offered by having proper legal pages. Prevention is better than cure when it comes to dealing with angry customers and lawyers.
Grab your free website legal pages plugin here
This is not an affiliate link, I don’t make a cent from recommending the plugin, it’s just damn good and will save you a bundle of money down the road.
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