One of the worst things that can happen to 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, many of which you may not be aware of.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring serious financial loss, but also the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this article, 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 digital business realm continues to grow at breakneck speed and rules keep changing, it’s important to stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your site remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if your online presence is an essential part of your business strategy.
Without legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not allow you to list your digital products on their network, PayPal could shut down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will suspend your applications, and you won’t be allowed into various other advertising or merchant networks.
Plus, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to lawsuits or legal action.
At the very least, if your online presence is not compliant, trust and confidence in your business could seriously diminish.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their policies!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on our website.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to a number of legal requirements in accordance with federal, state or local laws 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 offering or endorsing in your website, and
- There are solutions that can help your business become compliant, such as the tool that we discuss below.
In this article, we review a simple plugin for WordPress websites and blogs that provides a total compliance and disclaimer solution for your website.
Introducing …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is a total compliance and disclaimer solution for your digital presence …
Go here to learn more: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar Plugin to instantly make your site legally compliant:
Quick And Easy To Install And Set Up. Ready To Go To Work In No Time.
Compliance Bar Plugin is really easy to install. Just upload it to your Plugins folder via your WP dashboard and activate.
Easy-To-Edit Compliance Page Templates
You can easily make changes to the pre-built compliance templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress visual editor.
24/7 Support
Compliance Bar plugin provides a dedicated plugin support team to help users with anything they need.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Customized Legal Pages: Compliance Bar creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Full Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use and an entire library of training videos is available if users need assistance.
- Use In All Countries: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative 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 anywhere in the world.
- Can Be Used For All Niches: If your website is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for every website purpose. 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 ignore those that are not required.
Plugin Features
Compliance Bar provides many features to web site owners. Here are just a few of these:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Be up and running in very little time.
- Show Attractive Icon Bar – Display links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be placed on different locations on your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Restricted Information – If you plan to display content that should 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 site’s terms or 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. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying your visitors and covering your business from non-compliance.
- Records & Stores IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar can record your visitors’ IP address for reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcodes – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes to populate compliance pages with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and will display mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor web browsers.
Plugin Features – Details
Once the Compliance Bar plugin has been installed, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured gets added to your WordPress admin area.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this section where your business information can be entered (e.g. “Website URL,” “Support Desk URL,” “Contact Phone,” “Product Name,” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Desk URL,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Section – Image source: plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to dynamically populate and display the information from your User Profile into your page templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information 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 pages …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Here’s the full list of template pages made available by the Compliance Bar plugin when we last checked the 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 website or blog quickly and easily simply by selecting checkboxes and clicking the “Save” button at the bottom of the “Compliance Pages” screen …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Page Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added under the “Pages” section of your WordPress site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a default 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 site’s design …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Page Template Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Pages
You can edit and delete the compliance pages from the “Compliance Pages” area, just like any typical WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Page Templates – Image source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing 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 where to position the bar, whether to display links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, selecting 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, etc. …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create several Compliance Bars to display different icons on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in different areas of your website.
- The plugin allows you to display a Compliance Bar on the front page of your site, even if you are using particular 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, there is a limit to the number of page icons you can 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 to feature the compliance bar …
PopUps
If you plan to publish content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, adult, etc.), you can display pop-ups that force users to accept your site’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” tab 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 different uses in different sections 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 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 Screen: IP Log Details – Image source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you do business in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you must be aware of EU Cookie law …
The Compliance Bar plugin lets you manage the settings for compliance with EU User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” screen …
(EU Cookies Screen: 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 legal disclaimers and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” menu, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin update notifications …
Feedback From Users
Here are some of the testimonials plugin customers have published about 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)
***
”If you are like me, you maybe have quite a few WordPress sites, all needing attention and most importantly, all needing to be on the right side of the law! I’ve tried several legal pages plugins and in pretty much every case, they let me down. They simply cause more work than they solve.To me, the answer should be simple. It should work and it should let me get on with building my site. After all, I know I NEED to do this stuff, but hey, I don’t really WANT to! So, for me, I don’t want those plugins that cause more work than they solve. Simple eh? Well now it is because Anton & John have just created this baby that is the answer to my needs. The Compliance Bar Plugin does what I need it to do then lets me get on with my empire building…Perfect!” Tony Grant (Portfolio Sports)
Compliance Bar – Useful Tips
Here are a few additional ways you can use Compliance Bar:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons on specific pages only.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before purchase.
- If your website contains content that is inappropriate for persons below a certain age, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Plugin Support
Compliance Bar provides users with dedicated support to assist users if they experience any difficulties. You also get access to a complete set of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 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 money will be refunded in double.
Plugin Cost
- Single License Edition – Can be installed on a single domain. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business Licensing – Install the plugin on twenty-five of your own domains. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional License – Install the plugin on all of your own domains. Can be installed on any client site for payment or part of a paid service. Price = $97.00.
Please Note: Pricing for Compliance Bar can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the software is being retailed for the prices shown above. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the software author when you visit the plugin site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Compliance Bar Plugin
Additional Info
Legal Pages Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal templates have already been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get advice from a qualified legal expert in your area to ensure that your site is fully compliant.
For demo videos of the plugin, including installation instructions and tutorials, FAQs, customer helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
The Bottom Line
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven websites. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For more details, visit the plugin website: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Note: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice here. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with all legal requirements in your country or region.
***
