One of the worst things that can happen to a website owner is to suddenly discover that you have broken the law.
If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of suffering 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 review a simple and inexpensive WordPress solution that can help make your site fully compliant just minutes.
Is Your Website Legally Compliant?
As the cybersphere continues growing at breakneck speed and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s important to stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your site remains legally compliant, especially if your online presence is an essential component of your overall business strategy.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not approve your digital products for sale, PayPal may close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook and many other social networks will suspend your web applications, and you won’t be allowed into a range of leading advertising and affiliate marketing networks.
Plus, you may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your website complies with legal requirements and regulatory guidelines, trust and confidence in your business may be irrepairably.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use and policies!)
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on our website.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to a number of legal requirements in accordance with compulsory federal, state or local laws that govern your business,
- How important it is to maintain compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be promoting or using online, and
- There are plugins for WordPress website owners that can help your site become compliant, such as the tool that we discuss below.
In this article, you will learn about a simple WordPress plugin that provides a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your digital presence.
Announcing …
Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is an easy-to-use WordPress plugin that contains over twenty customizable compliance pages for your digital business …
For more details, visit the plugin site here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits Of Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Below are just a few of the benefits of using Compliance Bar Plugin to make your web site instantly compliant:
Ready To Go To Work In Minutes
Compliance Bar Plugin is quite easy to install. Just upload a zip file that contains the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your WP dashboard and activate.
Compliance Page Templates Are Easy To Edit
Easily modify the built-in compliance templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the visual editor.
Dedicated Plugin Support Team
The plugin developers provide dedicated support to help you.
Additional benefits include:
- Customized Legal Pages: The 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 full library of training videos is available.
- Use In All Countries: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to make sure that the legal templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Can Be Used For All Website Purposes: As long as your site is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Just select the compliance pages you want to add to your site and leave out any irrelevant pages.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar Plugin provides many unique features to WP users. Here are just some:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Ready to go to work in minutes.
- Display Visually Appealing Icons – Display links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations in your pages. You can also upload your own icons.
- Display Sensitive Content – If your site includes content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult content, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that require users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – If you do business in the EU or display your content to EU visitors, you must be aware of EU compliance requirements. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying users and covering your business from non-compliance.
- Record & Store IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar records and stores your visitors’ IP address for reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcode Driven – The plugin uses shortcodes to populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (including the pop-ups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and displays mobile optimized icons automatically based on visitor web browsers.
Using Compliance Bar
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured gets added to your WordPress dashboard.
Let’s briefly review these pages …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this section where your business information can be entered (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Business Address,” “Company Phone Number,” “Niche Market,” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Website URL,” “Business Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Section – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses shortcodes to insert the information from your User Profile inside your legal page templates …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required data has been input into the profile fields, you can then access the other plugin areas.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area lists all of the compliance page templates …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Pages – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Last time we checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 20 compliance templates available:
- About Us
- AdSense Disclaimer
- Affiliate Agreements
- Affiliate Disclosure
- 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
Creating compliance pages for your website or blog can be easily done. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click the “Save” button on the “Compliance Pages” screen …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added under the “Pages” section of your site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar icons can be changed. You can purchase additional icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your site’s design …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Page Icons – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Templates
You can customize and delete the legal templates in the “Compliance Pages” tab, just like any other WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Page Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing the legal templates is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin notifies you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. legal pages created before you installed the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin offers many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, selecting which pages to include an icon for 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, etc. …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create more than one Compliance Bar to display different icons on different pages, or to cover a range of uses throughout your site.
- The plugin allows you to display a Compliance Bar on the main page of your site, even if you are using a specific theme framework (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is configured through the theme itself as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile device screens, there is a limit to the number of page icons you can display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have configured your Compliance Bar settings, it displays links to your legal through dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like to feature your compliance icons …
PopUps
If you plan to publish content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult-related, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that force users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” screen lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create a number of customized Pop Ups for different pages, or to cover various uses throughout your site …
You can also set a delay time if you don’t want a Pop Up to display immediately, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time period, and store the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If your business is based in Europe or display your content to visitors in the EU, you must be aware of EU compliance requirements …
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” area …
(EU Cookies Section: Manage Settings – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar has a non-intrusive way of notifying your visitors and covering you from non-compliance.
Page Templates
The “Page Templates” tab, lists all of your compliance disclaimer templates and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” section, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin update notifications …
Testimonials
Below are some of the testimonials plugin users have provided for Compliance Bar:
”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)
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”Truly Amazing Product!” Patrick Mauchant – PT Enviromate Technology
Useful Tips
Here are some additional ways you can use Compliance Bar:
- Protect against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons on specific pages of your site only.
- Ending refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before purchase.
- If you include content that is deemed inappropriate for minors on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Support
Plugin Developers provide users with a dedicated support team to assist you with anything you need. Users also have access to video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 day, 200% refund guarantee. If your copy of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hours (M – F), the plugin developers will refund twice your cost of purchasing.
Software Price
- Single Edition – Can be installed on one domain that you own. Cost = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business Licensing – Can be installed on twenty-five domains that you own. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer – Install the plugin on all domains that you own. Can be installed on all client sites as part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Note: The cost of purchasing this product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the plugin is being retailed for the amounts shown above. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the product developer when you visit the site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Additional Info
Legal Page Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers state on their website that all legal templates have been reviewed and approved by lawyers. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for your own peace of mind.
For a demo video of the plugin in action, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
What We Recommend
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress websites. We recommend downloading and installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Important: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on this website. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is based.
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