One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to suddenly discover that you have broken the law.
Your website or blog needs to comply with a wide range of laws and regulations, some of which you may probably not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring serious financial costs, but also the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively?
In this post, we look at a simple and cost-effective WordPress solution that can help make your website fully compliant just minutes.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?
As the digital realm continues growing at breakneck speed and the rules constantly change, it’s vitally important to stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your website remains legally compliant, especially if your digital presence is a fundamental component of your overall business strategy.
Without legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t allow you to list your digital products on their network, PayPal could close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook could suspend your applications, and you won’t be accepted into most other advertising or merchant networks.
You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
At the very least, if your web presence is not compliant, it may impact on your visitors trust and confidence in doing business with you in the future.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on our website.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to a number of legal requirements in accordance with compulsory laws and regulations that govern your business (some of which you may not even be aware of),
- How important it is to be compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are offering or using in your website, and
- There are plugin-based solutions for WordPress users that can help your website become more compliant, such as the tool that we review below.
If your web site falls short in aspects of compliance, here is a simple plugin for WordPress users that you will probably be interested in knowing more about.
Announcing …
Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is a simple WordPress plugin containing over 20 customizable legal page templates for your site …
Learn more about this plugin here: Compliance Bar
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar Plugin to make your website or blog instantly compliant:
Quick And Easy To Install And Implement. Ready To Start Using In Very Little Time.
Compliance Bar Plugin is quite easy to install. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your WordPress admin user login and activate.
Page Templates Are Very Easy To Edit
You can easily modify the built-in templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu with the WordPress visual editor.
24/7 Support
The plugin develop provides a dedicated team to assist you if you experience any problems.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Customized Compliance Page Templates: The Compliance Bar plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Manuals: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use - a complete library of training videos is provided.
- Use Anywhere In The World: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to ascertain if the legal templates provided in Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin anywhere in the world.
- Can Be Used For All Website Purposes: If your website or blog runs on WordPress, you can use the plugin for all website purposes. Just select the templates you need to add to your site and ignore all other irrelevant pages.
Features
Compliance Bar provides many unique features to site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Show Visually Appealing Icons – Compliance Bar will display links to your compliance pages in the form of attractive icons that can be placed anywhere in your pages. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Display Restricted Content – If your website includes content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, dating, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that force users to accept your terms or disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you are based in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you must make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. The plugin displays an attractive bar notifying visitors and covering your website from non-compliance issues.
- Record & Store IP Addresses – The plugin records and stores the IP address of your visitors for reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they didn’t.
- Shortcodes – Compliance Bar uses shortcodes that automatically populate compliance pages with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the pop-ups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically based on visitor browsers.
Features – Details
Once you have installed the plugin, you will then have access to a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this section where your business details can be input (e.g. “Business Name,” “Registered Business Address,” “Company Phone Number,” “Product Name,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Website URL,” “Support Desk URL,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
The plugin uses shortcodes to dynamically insert the information from your User Profile fields into your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) information has been entered into the user profile fields, you can then access the other sections of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” screen includes a list of all of the plugin’s compliance template pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
When we last checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 22 legal templates available, addressing all areas of compliance:
- About Us
- AdSense Disclaimer
- Affiliate Agreements
- Affiliate Disclosure Statement
- Amazon Affiliate Disclaimer
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Contact Us
- Copyright/DCMA Notice
- Disclaimer
- Double Dart Cookies
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- FTC Statement
- Legal Disclaimer
- Linking Policy
- Medical Disclaimer
- Privacy Policy
- Returns/Refund Policy
- Support
- Terms
- Terms & Conditions
- Testimonial Disclosure
- XXX Disclosure
You can easily and quickly create legal pages for your website by simply selecting checkboxes and clicking ”Save” in the “Create Pages” screen …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Pages – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added under your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
Icons are customizable. You can purchase an additional set of icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your site’s design …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Templates
You can easily edit and delete the compliance disclaimer templates from the “Compliance Pages” screen, just as you would any typical WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Compliance Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing the legal pages is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin indicates if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. pages created before you installed the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin offers many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, whether to show links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, selecting which pages should be included in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your main page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and offset distance …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create a number of Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover different uses in other areas of your website.
- The plugin allows you to display the Compliance Bar on the front page of your website, even if you are using particular 3rd-party theme frameworks (like Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is specifically configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile screens, you can only select up to a certain number of page icons to display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have specified your Compliance Bar settings, it will display links to your compliance pages through dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like to display your compliance icons …
PopUps
If your website publishes content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that force users to accept your website’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” section gives you complete control over the settings and customization of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up for different pages, or to cover a range of uses throughout your site …
You can also set a delay time to prevent Pop Ups from displaying immediately, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time period, and record the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Screen: IP Log Details – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you do business in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you must be aware of EU Cookie law …
The Compliance Bar plugin lets you edit the settings for compliance with EU User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” screen …
(EU Cookies Screen: Manage Settings – Image source: plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar has a non-intrusive way of notifying your visitors and covering you from non-compliance.
Page Templates
The “Page Templates” section, lists all of your legal pages and shortcodes, and lets you modify their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” screen, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
User Feedback
Here are a few of the testimonials plugin customers have provided for the Compliance Bar Plugin plugin:
”WOW” Shon Chris – Director (JV Peer Group)
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“Don’t Risk Your Online Business” Mike Thomas (The Mike From Maine Show)
Compliance Bar Plugin Tips
Below are some useful ways you can use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Display compliance icons on specific pages only.
- End refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before purchase.
- If your website includes content that is considered inappropriate for persons below a certain age, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Support
Compliance Bar provides users with a dedicated support team to help you with anything you need. You also have access to video training.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, 30 day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your version of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hours (Monday to Friday), your purchase price will be refunded in double.
Product Cost
- Single Site Licensing – Can be installed on 1 of your own domains. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business License – Can be installed on twenty-five of your own domains. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional License – Install the plugin on all of your own domains. Can be installed on any client site for payment or part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: Price details for Compliance Bar depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software retails for the amounts shown above. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the product seller when you visit the plugin website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Additional Plugin Information
Templates Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal page templates have already been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get professional advice from a qualified legal expert in your area to ensure that your site is fully compliant.
For a demo video showing plugin usage, including installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
Get This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress websites and blogs. We recommend installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on our website. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with the law wherever your business is based.
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