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 having broken the law.
Your digital presence must comply with a whole set of federal, state and even local laws and regulatory guidelines, some of which you are probably not even 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 article, we look at 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 to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules constantly change, it’s vital that you stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your site remains legally compliant, especially if your digital presence is an integral part of your business strategy.
Without legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t approve your digital products for sale, PayPal may shut down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook and many other social sites could suspend your apps, and you won’t be allowed into various other advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
If your digital presence is not in compliance, you could also end up facing a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your site complies with legal requirements and regulations, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to be irrepairably affected.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party services require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on this website.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to many legal requirements in accordance with mandatory federal, state or local laws 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 may be promoting or using on your website, and
- There are cost-effective solutions for WordPress users that can help your site become compliant, such as the plugin that we discuss below.
If you suspect that your web site falls short in terms of compliance, we discuss below a simple plugin for WordPress users you will probably be interested in knowing more about.
Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …
Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
The Compliance Bar Plugin For WordPress is a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your website …
Learn more about the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits Of Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Here we have listed just some of the many benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to make your website or blog instantly compliant:
Quick And Easy To Install And Set Up. Ready To Start Using In Minutes.
Compliance Bar Plugin installs just like any regular WP plugin. Just upload it to your Plugins folder via your administrator section and activate.
Easy To Edit Page Templates
Easily edit the pre-built templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WordPress visual editor.
24/7 Plugin Support
Compliance Bar provides a dedicated support team to help you.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Customized Compliance Templates: Compliance Bar will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Full Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use - an entire library of training videos is available.
- Can Be Used In Every Country: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to make sure that the legal templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Use For Any Website Purpose: As long as your site is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Select only the types of disclaimers which pertain to your particular business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and leave out any pages that are unnecessary.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar offers many great features to WordPress users. Here are just a few:
- Fast and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in minutes.
- Show Attractive Icons – Display links to your compliance pages using attractive icons that can be placed anywhere in your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Display Restricted Information – If you plan to display content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, dating, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that require users to accept your site’s terms or disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you need to be aware of EU compliance laws. The plugin displays an attractive bar that notifies visitors and covers your website from non-compliance issues.
- Record And Store IP Addresses – The plugin records and stores the IP address of your visitors for reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcodes – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes to populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your website, (even in the pop-ups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and displays mobile optimized icons automatically based on the web browser being used.
Compliance Bar Features – Details
Once you have installed the Compliance Bar plugin, users will have access to various sections where you can configure the plugin’s settings.
Let’s briefly review these areas …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this area where your business details can be input (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Business Address,” “Contact Phone,” “Niche Market,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Desk URL,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The plugin uses dynamic shortcodes to automatically insert and display the information you’ve inputted into your User Profile inside your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information has been entered into the user profile fields, users can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area contains all of your compliance template pages …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Below is the full list of legal templates made available by the plugin last time we checked their website:
- 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 create compliance pages for your blog or website quickly and easily simply by selecting checkboxes and clicking the “Save” button on the “Create Pages” section …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Templates – Screenshot 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 default set of 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 theme …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Page Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Page Templates
You can modify and delete your legal page templates from the “Compliance Pages” screen, just like any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing your compliance pages is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin will notify you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. pages created before installing 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 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 more …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create multiple Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in different areas of your website.
- The plugin allows you to display the Compliance Bar on the home page of your site, even if you are using a specific premium theme (like Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), 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 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 will display 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 the compliance icons to be featured …
PopUps
If your website publishes content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult, etc.), you can display popups that blocks access to users who do not accept your website’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” page gives you complete control over the settings and customization of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up for different pages, or to cover various uses in different sections of your site …
You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want Pop Ups to display as soon as visitors arrive, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time interval, and even record 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 you do business 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 Compliance Bar plugin lets you customize the settings for compliance with EU User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” tab …
(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” screen, lists all of your compliance page templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” tab, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin update notifications …
Feedback From Users
Below are a couple of the testimonials plugin users have submitted for Compliance Bar:
”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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”You wouldn’t drive a car around without insurance…so don’t RISK your online business by neglecting a simple, but important detail: website compliance. Grab your copy of Compliance Bar & protect yourself today!” Mike Thomas (The Mike From Maine Show)
Compliance Bar Plugin – Useful Tips
Below are some additional ways to use Compliance Bar:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages of your site.
- Reduce refund disputes by clearly spelling out the refund terms before purchase.
- If you publish adult content on your website, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Compliance Bar Plugin Product Support
Plugin Developers provide users with dedicated support to assist you with anything you need. Plugin users also have access to video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, thirty day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your edition of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hrs (M – F), your money will be refunded in double.
Product Price
- Single – Install the plugin on a single site. Price = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business – Can be installed on 25 domains that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer License Edition – Install the plugin on all of your own sites. Install the plugin on all client sites for payment or part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: The cost to purchase Compliance Bar depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. The pricing shown above was current at the time this content was published. This may or may not be the actual price set by the plugin developer when you visit the site and there may be additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details here: Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Compliance Bar – Additional Information
Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers claim on their website that all legal page templates have 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 showing how the plugin works, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
Install This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven websites and blogs. We recommend downloading and installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Note: Once again, we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice in this article. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements in your country or region.
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