One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
If your website isn’t compliant with laws designed to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of suffering serious financial losses and 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 look at a simple and inexpensive WordPress solution that can help make your site legally compliant in minutes.
Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?
As the digital realm continues growing at breakneck speed and the rules of the game are constantly changing, it’s vital that you stay on top of what’s going on and to make sure that your website remains legal, especially if your web presence is an integral part of your overall business strategy.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t allow you to list your digital products for sale, PayPal could close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook could suspend your apps, and you won’t be allowed into many advertising or affiliate marketing networks.
You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to being exploited by opportunistic online users.
At the very least, if you are not compliant, visitors could lose trust and confidence in your business.
(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 cannot offer legal advice here.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to many legal requirements in accordance with federal, state or local laws and regulations that govern your business,
- The importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be promoting or using online, and
- There are easy-to-install solutions that can help your website become more compliant, such as the plugin that we review below.
If you suspect that your website or blog is lacking in terms of compliance, we discuss below a simple plugin for WordPress websites and blogs you should know more about.
Announcing …
Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is an easy-to-use WordPress plugin that includes over twenty customizable compliance templates for your online presence …
For more details, visit the plugin site here: Compliance Bar Plugin
Plugin Benefits
Here we have listed just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your web site legally compliant:
Be Up And Running In Minutes
Compliance Bar is very easy to install. Simply upload a zip folder containing the plugin to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate.
Templates Are Easy To Edit
Easily make changes to the default legal page templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu using the WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Plugin Support
The plugin developers provide dedicated plugin support to assist users.
Additional benefits of using the plugin include the following:
- Customized Compliance Pages: Compliance Bar will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and a complete library of training videos is provided if users need assistance.
- Can Be Used In Every Country: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to make sure that the templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin anywhere in the world.
- Use For Every Website Purpose: If your site runs on WordPress, you can use the plugin for any website purpose. Just select the pages you need to add to your site and leave out the irrelevant pages.
Compliance Bar Plugin Features
Compliance Bar provides a number of features to WP users. Below we have listed just a few of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in no time.
- Display Attractive Icons – Display links to your compliance pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations on your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Sensitive Content – If your website contains content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that force users to accept your website’s terms or disclaimers.
- EU Cookie Compliance – 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. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar that notifies visitors and protects your business from non-compliance issues.
- Record And Store IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar can record the IP address of your visitors for future reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcodes – The plugin is integrated with shortcodes that automatically populate the templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your website, (including the popups).
- Compatible With Mobile Devices – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices and displays mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor web browsers.
Compliance Bar Features – Details
Once the Compliance Bar plugin has been installed, you will then get access to a number of sections where you can configure the plugin’s settings.
Let’s go through these settings briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this screen where your business information can be input (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Registered Company Address,” “Contact Phone,” “Product Name,” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Website URL,” “Company Phone Number,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The plugin uses dynamic shortcodes to populate and display the information from your User Profile fields inside your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required information has been entered into the user profile fields, you can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area contains all of the legal templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Here’s the complete list of templates made available by the plugin last time we checked the website:
- 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 site is a simple process. Just select the checkboxes next to the pages you want to create and click ”Save” at the bottom of the “Create Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Pages – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added inside your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar icons are customizable. 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 Template Icons – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Templates
You can easily edit and delete your legal templates from the “Compliance Pages” screen, just like any typical page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Legal Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing the compliance 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 settings area provides many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, specifying which pages to include an icon for in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your home page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, etc. …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create multiple Compliance Bars to show different icons on different pages, or to cover various uses in other areas of your site.
- The plugin allows you to display the Compliance Bar on the home page of your site, even if you are using particular themes (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), 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 configured your Compliance Bar settings, it will display links to your compliance pages through dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like to display your compliance bar …
PopUps
If you plan to show content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, adult-related, etc.), the plugin can display popups that restricts access to users who do not accept your terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” section gives you complete control over the settings and wordings of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create an unlimited number of customized Pop Ups for different pages, or to cover different 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 appearing again within a specific time period, and store 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 are based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, 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” section, lists all of your compliance disclaimers and shortcodes, and lets you modify their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” screen, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin updates …
Feedback From Users
Below are a few of the testimonials that plugin users have provided for the Compliance Bar plugin:
”WOW” Shon Chris – Director (JV Peer Group)
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”I Highly Recommend Compliance Bar” Tony Grant (Portfolio Sports)
Compliance Bar Plugin – Useful Tips
Below are some useful ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons on specific pages only.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before purchase.
- If your site published content for adults only, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Support
Plugin Developers provide users with dedicated 24/7 plugin support to help users. Plugin users also get access to an entire set of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 day, 200% refund guarantee. If your edition 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 Pricing
- Single Edition – Can be installed on one of your own sites. Price = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business Edition – Install the plugin on 25 sites that you own. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer – Install the plugin on all domains that you own. Can be installed on any client site for payment or as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: The cost to purchase the product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the product is being retailed for the amounts shown above. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin developer when you visit the plugin website 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 Plugin – Additional Info
Legal Pages Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers state on their website that all legal templates have already been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for your peace of mind.
For demo videos of the plugin, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
Get The Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven websites and blogs. We recommend installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
To learn more, visit the plugin website here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Note: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no 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 is compliant with the law in your country or region.
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