One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to receive a notice of legal action as a result of breaking a law or regulation.
Your website or blog needs to comply with many federal, state and even local laws and regulatory guidelines, some of which you may probably not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring serious financial losses, 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 inexpensive solution for WordPress users that can help make your website fully compliant in minutes.
Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?
As the cybersphere continues to grow at breakneck speed and the rules of the game are constantly changing, it’s vital that you stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your website or blog remains legal, especially if your online presence is an essential component of your business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your website (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal could close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will suspend your apps, and you will not be accepted into most other advertising or merchant networks.
You could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to lawsuits.
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your website complies with all legal requirements and regulations, visitors could lose trust and confidence in your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use and policies!)
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 could be subject to various legal requirements in accordance with mandatory federal, state and local laws that govern your business,
- How important it is to comply with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be offering or endorsing online, and
- There are solutions that can help your business become more compliant, such as the solution that we review in this article.
In this article, you will learn about a simple plugin for WordPress websites and blogs that provides a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your site.
Presenting …
Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is a total compliance and disclaimer solution for your digital presence …
For more details go here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits Of Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Below we have listed just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to make your website or blog instantly compliant:
Be Up And Running In Very Little Time
Compliance Bar Plugin installs just like every plugin. Just upload a zip file that contains the plugin to your Plugin folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate.
Templates Are Very Easy To Edit
Easily edit the pre-built legal page templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress visual editor.
24/7 Plugin Support
Compliance Bar plugin provides dedicated plugin support to assist users with anything they need.
Additional benefits of this plugin include:
- Customized Templates: The Compliance Bar plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Full Video Training: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and an entire library of training videos is provided.
- Use In All Countries: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to ascertain if the built-in templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Use For All Website Purposes: As long as your website or blog is driven by WordPress, you can use the plugin for all website purposes. Just select the legal pages you want to include in your site and ignore all other irrelevant pages.
Compliance Bar Plugin Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers a number of features to WordPress users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and set up. Ready to start using in very little time.
- Show Attractive Icon Bar – Compliance Bar will display links to your compliance pages in the form of attractive icons that can be placed anywhere on your pages. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Display Sensitive Information – If your website publishes content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that require users to accept your terms or disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you are based in Europe 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 business from non-compliance issues.
- Record And Store IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar records and stores the IP addresses of your visitors for future reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcode Driven – The plugin 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 popups).
- Compatible With All Mobile Devices – Compliance Bar has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and can display mobile optimized icons automatically based on visitor web browsers.
Using Compliance Bar
Once the Compliance Bar plugin has been installed, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured gets added to your WP admin area.
Let’s review these settings briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this area where you can input your business details into entered (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Registered Business Address,” “Location Details,” “Refund Duration (Days),” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Website URL,” “Company Phone Number,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Page – Image source: plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to populate the information from your User Profile inside your legal page templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) data has been input into the plugin settings fields, you can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” screen lists all of your pages …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Pages – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
When we last checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 22 compliance page templates available to plugin users:
- 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 create compliance pages for your site simply by selecting checkboxes and clicking ”Save” in the “Create Pages” tab …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added inside 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 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 site’s design …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Pages
You can customize and delete the compliance templates in the “Compliance Pages” section, just like any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Legal Page Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing your 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 installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin settings area provides various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, whether to display 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 main page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and offset distance …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create a number of Compliance Bars to show different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover a range of uses throughout your website.
- The plugin allows you to display the Compliance Bar on the front page of your site, even if you are using particular premium 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 normal “static” 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 displays links to your compliance pages using dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like to display the compliance icons …
PopUps
If you plan to display content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult content, etc.), you can display pop-ups that blocks access to users who do not accept your website’s terms or 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 – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
You can create an unlimited number of Pop Ups for different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in other areas of your site …
You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want Pop Ups to display immediately, set cookie durations to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time period, and capture the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Screenshot 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 …
The 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” 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 compliance templates and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” screen, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin update notifications …
User Testimonials
Below are some of the testimonials and comments that users have published about the Compliance Bar plugin:
”One of the most annoying parts about building out a site is to make sure it complies with the law. I always leave this part to the end because its painfully dry and boring and frankly I always just wished their was an easier way. Then I came across Compliance Bar and its literally the most versitile and brilliant plugin I have ever used. All my pages meet FTC requirements now and all I had to do was press a button! Anton and Jon..you guys friggen rock — 1000% highly recommend this!!” Anthony La Rocca – Founder (Hustle Marketing)
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”I wanted to reach out & say Compliance Bar is a truly amazing product for keeping my online marketing efforts on the right side of the internet laws. Not only does it look fantastic on my sites, it is also intuitive and robustly powerful. It is packed full of features to allow me the flexibility to control exactly what my visitors need to see and know” Patrick Mauchant – PT Enviromate Technology
Useful Tips
Here are a few useful ways you can use Compliance Bar:
- Protection against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Display compliance icons on specific pages of your website only.
- Minimize refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before purchase.
- If your site includes content that is inappropriate for minors, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Support
Compliance Bar provides users with dedicated support to help you if you experience any problems. Users also get access to a complete set of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, thirty 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 the cost of purchase.
Plugin Pricing
- Single – Install the plugin on a single site. Price = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business License Edition – Can be installed on 25 of your own domains. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional Licensing – Install the plugin on multiple of your own sites. Install the plugin on any client site for payment or as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: The cost to purchase Compliance Bar can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The pricing shown above was correct when this review was written. This may or may not be the actual pricing set by the software author when you visit the plugin site and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar – Additional Info
Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal page templates have already been reviewed and approved by lawyers. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for your peace of mind.
For ”how-to” videos showing how the software works, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
In Conclusion
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-powered websites. We recommend installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, visit the plugin website here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice in this article. 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 in your country or region.
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