One of the worst things that can happen to a website owner is to break the law.
Your website has to comply with many federal, state and even local laws, some of which you may not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of incurring serious financial losses and the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively?
In this post, we look at a simple and very inexpensive solution for WordPress users that can help make your site compliant just minutes.
Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?
As the cybersphere continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules keep changing, it’s important that you stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your website remains compliant, especially if your online presence is an integral aspect of your overall business strategy.
Without legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many 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 freeze your funds, Facebook could suspend your web applications, and you won’t be accepted into various other advertising and affiliate marketing networks.
If your digital presence is not compliant, you could also face a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if your digital presence is not compliant, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to be seriously affected.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with mandatory federal, state or local laws and regulations that govern your business,
- The importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be promoting or endorsing online, and
- There are inexpensive solutions that can help your business become more compliant, such as the tool that we review in this post.
If you suspect that your web site lacks in areas of compliance, we discuss below a simple plugin for WordPress users that you should know more about.
Announcing …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-install WordPress plugin that includes over 20 customizable compliance disclaimer templates for your site …
For more details go here: Compliance Bar
Plugin Benefits
Below are just a few of the benefits of using Compliance Bar Plugin to instantly make your website or blog legally compliant:
Installation Is Easy And Simple
Compliance Bar installs just like every other plugin. Simply upload a zip file containing the plugin to your Plugins folder via your WordPress administrator account and activate.
Easily Editable Legal Page Templates
Easily edit the built-in compliance templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress WYSIWYG content editor.
Dedicated 24/7 Plugin Support
Compliance Bar provides a dedicated team to help users with anything they need.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Customized Compliance Templates: The plugin will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use - a complete library of training videos is provided if users need help.
- Use In Every Country: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to ascertain if the legal templates provided in the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin anywhere in the world.
- Use For All Niches: If your website is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Just select the pages you need to add to your site and ignore the irrelevant pages.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers many features to WP users. Below we have listed just some:
- Quick and simple to install and implement. Ready to go to work in no time.
- Show Visually Appealing Icon Bar – Compliance Bar displays links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations in your page. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Show Restricted Information – If your website includes content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, adult-related, etc.), you can display popups that force users to accept your terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you are based in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying your visitors and covering your business from non-compliance.
- Records And Stores IP Addresses – The plugin records and stores the IP addresses of your visitors for reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcode Driven – The plugin uses shortcodes to populate compliance pages with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your website, (including the pop-ups).
- Works On All Mobile Devices – Compliance Bar has settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and will display mobile optimized icons automatically based on the browser being used.
Plugin Features – Details
After installing and activating the plugin, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured is added to your WordPress dashboard.
Let’s briefly review these pages …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this area where your information can be entered (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Email,” “Contact Phone,” “Product Name,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Website URL,” “Company Phone Number,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar uses dynamic shortcodes to insert the information into your page templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required data has been input into the user profile fields, you can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” section contains all of your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
When we last checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 22 compliance templates available, addressing all aspects 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
- Adult Content Disclosure
Creating legal pages for your website can be easily done. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click the “Save” button in the “Create Pages” screen …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a built-in set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar icons can be changed. You can purchase an additional set of icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your theme …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Templates
You can easily edit and delete your legal page templates from the “Compliance Pages” section, just like any typical WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing your compliance templates is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin notifies you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. compliance pages created before you installed the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin settings area provides various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, specifying which pages should be included in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your front page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and offset distance …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create an unlimited number of Compliance Bars to show different icons on different pages, or to cover different uses in different areas of your website.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the main page of your website, even if you are using particular WordPress themes (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” 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 configured your Compliance Bar settings, it displays 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 the compliance icons …
PopUps
If you plan to show content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult-related, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that restricts access to visitors who do not accept your terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” tab gives you complete control over the settings and wordings of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up for different pages, or to cover a range of uses in other areas of your site …
You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want a Pop Up to display immediately, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time period, and even record the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Screen: IP Log Details – Image source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If your business is 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 …
Compliance Bar 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” section …
(EU Cookies Screen: Manage Settings – Screenshot 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” area, lists all of your legal templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” tab, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
Testimonials From Users
Here are a couple of the testimonials and comments plugin customers have written about the Compliance Bar Plugin plugin:
”When I got my hands on Compliance Bar, I knew I needed help to be compliant, but I had no idea how much danger I was in, nor did I know all of the different things I needed to be compliant. Once I installed Compliance Bar, I was able to very quickly add all the items I needed to ensure I didn’t end up getting fined by various agencies, or have my site pulled from Google. The best part is that getting it all set up took only minutes, and I know that I am far safer than I was. Compliance Bar is one of the best plugins I have used in a long time.” Ray Lane – (The Video Guy)
***
”I Highly Recommend Compliance Bar” Tony Grant (Portfolio Sports)
Compliance Bar – Useful Tips
Here are some additional ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protect against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages of your site.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before customers 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.
Plugin Support
Plugin Developers provide users with a dedicated plugin support team to help you with anything you need. Users also have access to video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, thirty day, 200% refund guarantee. If your version of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hours (M – F), your purchase price will be refunded in double.
Product Cost
- Single License Edition – Can be installed on 1 site that you own. Price = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business – Can be installed on up to 25 of your own sites. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional License – Install the plugin on all domains that you own. Install the plugin on all client sites for payment or part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Note: Current pricing for Compliance Bar depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. When we last checked, the software sells for the amounts shown above. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the product developer when you visit the product website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Additional Plugin Information
Legal Page Templates Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers state on their website that all legal templates have been reviewed and approved by lawyers. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for peace of mind.
For a demo video of the plugin, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
Download The Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven websites. We recommend installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For complete details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on our website. You must 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.
***