One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to break the law.
If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended to protect consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of suffering significant financial costs, but also the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively?
In this article, we review a simple and very inexpensive solution for WordPress users that can help make your website fully compliant just minutes.
Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?
As the cybersphere continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s important that you stay informed about what’s going on and to make sure that your website remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if your web presence is an integral component of your business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t approve your digital products for sale, PayPal could close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you won’t be accepted into a range of leading advertising and affiliate marketing networks.
You could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to expensive litigation.
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your website complies with legal requirements and regulations, it may impact on your visitors trust and confidence in doing any future business with you.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice here.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with compulsory federal, state or local laws and regulations that govern your business (some of which you may probably not even be aware of),
- The importance of complying with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are promoting or endorsing in your website, and
- There are solutions that can help your site become more compliant, such as the solution that we review below.
If your web site lacks in areas of compliance, there is a simple WordPress plugin you may be interested in knowing more about.
Introducing …
Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is a simple and easy-to-install plugin for WordPress sites that contains over twenty customizable legal pages for your website …
Learn more here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Here we have listed just a few of the benefits of using Compliance Bar Plugin to make your web site instantly legally compliant:
Fast And Simple To Install And Use. Be Up And Running In Very Little Time.
Compliance Bar Plugin installs like any WordPress plugin. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your admin account and activate.
Legal Page Templates Are Really Easy To Edit
Easily modify the default compliance templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu with the WYSIWYG editor.
Dedicated Plugin Support Team
The plugin developers provide dedicated plugin support to help users if they experience any problems.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Customized Compliance Pages: The plugin will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Full Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use - a complete library of training videos is available.
- Can Be Used In Every Country: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to ascertain if the default legal page templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin anywhere in the world.
- Use For Any Website Purpose: If your website or blog is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Just select the templates you want to include in your site and leave out the irrelevant pages.
Compliance Bar Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers many unique features to website owners. Below we have listed just some:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Be up and running in minutes.
- Show Visually Appealing Icons – Display links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be positioned anywhere in your pages. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Sensitive Content – 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 force users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you must make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. The plugin displays an attractive bar that notifies your users and protects your website from non-compliance.
- Record & Store IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar records and stores your visitors’ IP address for future reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcodes – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes to automatically populate legal pages with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (including the pop-ups).
- Compatible With All Mobile Devices – Compliance Bar has settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and can display mobile optimized icons automatically depending on the web browser being used.
Features – Details
After installing and activating the plugin, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured gets added to your WP admin area.
Let’s review these briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this section where your business details can be entered (e.g. “Business Name,” “Company Address,” “Contact Phone,” “Market Niche,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Email,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page – Image source: plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses shortcodes to populate the information inside your legal templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information has been input into the profile fields, users can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area contains all of the compliance templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Pages – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Below is the full list of legal templates made available by the Compliance Bar plugin last time we checked the site:
- 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
You can easily and quickly create legal pages for your blog or website by simply selecting checkboxes and clicking ”Save” on the “Compliance Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added under the “Pages” section of your WordPress site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
The icons are customizable. You can purchase additional icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your theme …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Pages
You can easily modify and delete your compliance pages from the “Compliance Pages” section, just like any typical WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin indicates if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. compliance pages created before you installed the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin offers many 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 to include an icon for 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 multiple Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover different uses throughout your website.
- The plugin allows you to display the Compliance Bar on the home page of your website, even if you are using a specific theme (like Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is configured through the theme itself as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile device 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 legal using dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance icons to show …
PopUps
If your site contains content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, dating, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that restricts access to users who do not accept your terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” page gives you full control over the settings and customization of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up displaying on different pages, or to cover various uses throughout your website …
You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want a Pop Up to display as soon as visitors arrive, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time interval, and store the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Image source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you are based in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you must be aware of EU Cookie law …
Compliance Bar lets you edit the settings for compliance with EU Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” tab …
(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” screen, lists all of your compliance templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” screen, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin updates …
User Testimonials
Here are a couple of the testimonials that customers have provided for the Compliance Bar 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)
***
“Don’t Risk Your Online Business” Mike Thomas (The Mike From Maine Show)
Compliance Bar Plugin Tips
Here are a few useful ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before purchase.
- If you include content for adults only on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Support
Plugin Developers provide users with a dedicated plugin support team to assist you. Plugin users also have access to video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your copy of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 business hours (M – F), your money will be refunded in double.
Plugin Cost
- Single – Can be installed on 1 of your own domains. Cost = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business – Can be installed on up to twenty-five sites that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer License Edition – Can be installed on all of your own sites. Install the plugin on any client site for payment or part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: Price details for Compliance Bar Plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. When we last checked, the software retails for the prices shown above. This may not be the actual price charged by the software author when you visit the 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
Compliance Bar Plugin – Additional Info
Legal Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal page templates have already been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get advice from a qualified legal expert in your area to ensure that your site is fully compliant.
For a demo video of the plugin in action, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
In Conclusion
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven websites and blogs. We recommend installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar Plugin – WP Compliance Plugin
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, 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 to ensure that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is based.
***
