One of the worst things that can happen to a website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.
Your digital presence has to comply with a whole set of laws and regulatory guidelines, some of which you may not even be aware of.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of incurring significant financial losses and the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this article, we look at a simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress users that can help make your website legally compliant just minutes.
Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?
As the internet continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game keep changing, it’s vital that you stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your website or blog remains compliant, especially if your online presence is a significant part of your business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank will not approve your digital products on their network, PayPal may shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook and many other social networks will suspend your web apps, and you will not be accepted into various advertising and merchant networks.
You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to lawsuits.
At the very least, without making it clear to your visitors that your web properties comply with legal requirements and regulatory guidelines, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to seriously diminish.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use!)
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with compulsory laws and regulations that govern your business,
- How important it is to remain compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be offering or using in your website, and
- There are solutions that can help your business become compliant, such as the solution that we review below.
In this article, we review a simple WordPress plugin that provides a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your online business.
Announcing …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is a simple and easy-to-use WordPress plugin that includes over 20 customizable compliance disclaimers for your website …
Learn more here: Compliance Bar
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Below we have listed just some of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your website or blog legally compliant:
Quick And Simple To Install And Configure. Ready To Use In No Time.
Compliance Bar installs like every other plugin. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate.
Legal Page Templates Are Very Easy To Edit
You can easily edit the built-in legal templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu with the WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Plugin Support
The plugin develop provides a dedicated plugin support team to help users if they experience any difficulties.
Some additional plugin benefits include:
- Customized Compliance Templates: The Compliance Bar plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use and a full 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 legal templates provided with Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Can Be Used For All Niches: If your website is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for all kinds of websites. Just select the pages you need to include in your site and ignore all other irrelevant pages.
Features
Compliance Bar offers a number of features to WordPress users. Below we have listed just some:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Be up and running in minutes.
- Show Attractive Icon Bar – Display links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be placed on different locations on your page. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Display Restricted Content – If you plan to display content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult content, etc.), you can display pop-ups that require users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If your business is based in Europe or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying visitors and covering your site from non-compliance issues.
- Record And Store IP Addresses – The plugin can record your visitors’ IP address for future reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcode Driven – The plugin uses shortcodes that populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site or blog, (including the popups).
- Works On All Mobile Devices – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices and can display mobile optimized icons automatically depending on the web browser being used.
Using The Plugin
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured gets added to your WP dashboard.
Let’s go through these settings briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this area where your business information can be input (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Desk URL,” “Company Phone Number,” “Niche Area,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Support Email,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar uses dynamic shortcodes to insert the information from your User Profile into your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) information has been input into the profile fields, you can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area lists all of your legal template pages …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Below is the complete list of legal templates made available by the Compliance Bar plugin when we last 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
- XXX Disclosure
You can easily and quickly create compliance pages for your site simply by selecting check boxes and clicking the “Save” button on the “Compliance Pages” section …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added inside the “Pages” section of your WordPress site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a default set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
Icons are customizable. You can purchase additional icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your site’s design …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Legal Page Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Page Templates
You can easily edit and delete your legal disclaimer templates from the “Compliance Pages” tab, just as you would any typical WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Compliance Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Editing your legal pages is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin notifies you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
You have various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, whether to show 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 front page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, etc. …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create a number of Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover different uses in different sections of your site.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the main page of your website, even if you are using a specific theme framework (e.g. Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is 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 device 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 displays links to your legal through a visually attractive 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 your website has content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, ecigs, adult, etc.), the plugin can display popups that force users to accept your site’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 – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up displaying on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses in other areas of your website …
You can also set 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 period, and record 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 your business is based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you need to 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 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 legal templates and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” tab, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
User Feedback
Below are a couple of the testimonials that customers have written 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)
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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
Compliance Bar – Useful Tips
Below are some additional ways to use Compliance Bar:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Display compliance icons only on specific pages of your website.
- Reducing refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before customers 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.
Plugin Support
Plugin Developers provide users with dedicated plugin support to assist users if they experience any difficulties. Users also have access to an entire set of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, 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 purchase price will be refunded in double.
Plugin Pricing
- Single License Edition – Can be installed on a single domain. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business License – Can be installed on up to twenty-five domains that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer Edition – Can be installed on all as many of your own sites as you like. Install the plugin on any client site for payment or as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: The price of Compliance Bar can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The price shown above was current at the time this article was written. This may or may not be the actual price set by the plugin developer 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 current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Compliance Bar Plugin – Additional Information
Legal Pages Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal page templates have already been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that you get professional advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for peace of mind.
For ”how to” videos of the plugin, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
Get This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven websites. 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 – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on our website. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with the law in your country or region.
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