One of the worst things that can happen to you as a website owner is to receive a notice of legal action as a result of breaking the law.
If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended to protect the rights of consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring financial loss, but also the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively?
In this post, we review a simple and easy-to-use WordPress solution 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 are constantly changing, it’s vitally important to stay on top of what’s happening and to make sure that your website or blog remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if your online presence is a significant part of your business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your website (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not approve your digital products for sale, PayPal could close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will suspend your web apps, and you will not be accepted into a number of leading advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
Plus, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to being slapped with a lawsuit.
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your website complies with legal requirements and regulations, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to seriously diminish.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice in this article.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to a number of legal requirements in accordance with federal, state or local laws and regulations that govern your business (some of which you may not even be aware of),
- The importance of maintaining compliance 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 website become compliant, such as the solution that we review below.
If your website or blog lacks in areas of compliance, here is a simple WordPress plugin that you should know more about.
Announcing …
Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar is a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your online presence …
Go here to learn more: Compliance Bar
Benefits Of Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Here we have listed just some of the many benefits of using Compliance Bar to make your web site instantly legally compliant:
Quick And Simple To Install And Set Up. Ready To Use In Minutes.
Compliance Bar Plugin is quite easy to install. Simply upload a zip folder containing the plugin to your Plugins folder via your admin user login and activate.
Templates Are Easy To Edit
You can easily modify the prebuilt templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu using the WordPress visual editor.
24/7 Support
Compliance Bar provides a dedicated team to help you if you experience any difficulties.
Some additional benefits of using this plugin include:
- Customized Legal Pages: The Compliance Bar plugin will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use - a full library of training videos is provided if users need help.
- Use In All Countries: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to make sure that the built-in legal page templates provided in Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Use For Every Website Purpose: As long as your site is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for every website purpose. Select only the types of disclaimers that pertain to your particular business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore any that you don’t need.
Compliance Bar Features
Compliance Bar provides many unique features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Quick and easy to install and implement. Ready to go to work in no time.
- Show Attractive Icons – Display links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be positioned anywhere in your pages. You can also upload your own icons.
- Display Sensitive Content – If your website publishes content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult-related, etc.), you can display popups 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 website from non-compliance.
- Record And Store IP Acceptance – The plugin records the IP addresses of your visitors for reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcode Driven – The plugin is integrated with shortcodes to automatically populate the templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (including the pop-ups).
- Mobile Friendly – Compliance Bar has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and displays mobile optimized icons automatically depending on the web browser being used.
Compliance Bar Features – Details
After installing and activating the plugin, users will have access to a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured.
Let’s briefly review these pages …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this section where you can input your business details into entered (e.g. “Business Name,” “Registered Address,” “Location Details,” “Niche Area,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Company Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Page – Image source: plugin documentation)
The plugin uses shortcodes to insert the information from your User Profile inside your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Screen: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) data has been entered into the profile fields, users can then access the other areas of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area contains all of the page templates …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Here’s the full list of legal 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 legal pages for your blog or website can be easily done. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click the “Save” button at the bottom of the “Compliance Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added under the “Pages” section of your site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin comes with a default set of attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The 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 theme …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Page Template Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Templates
You can customize and delete the legal page templates in the “Compliance Pages” tab, just as you would any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance Page Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes
- Editing 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
The plugin offers many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, specifying which pages should be included 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, and more …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create a number of Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover different uses throughout your site.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the front page of your website, even if you are using particular premium theme frameworks (like Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” 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 through a visually appealing icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance bar to display …
PopUps
If your website includes content that may be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult-related, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that blocks access to users who do not accept your terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” page lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image source: plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up for different pages, or to cover various uses in other areas of your site …
You can also specify a delay time to prevent a Pop Up from displaying immediately, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time period, and even record the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Image source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
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 …
The Compliance Bar plugin 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 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 page templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” menu, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials and comments plugin users 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)
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“Don’t Risk Your Online Business” Mike Thomas (The Mike From Maine Show)
Plugin Tips
Here are some useful ways to use Compliance Bar:
- Protecting against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages of your site.
- Reduce refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before customers purchase.
- If you publish adult content on your site, 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 assist you. Plugin users also have access to complete video training.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 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 hrs (M – F), your purchase price will be refunded in double.
Plugin Pricing
- Single User License – Install the plugin on one of your own sites. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business License Edition – Install the plugin on up to twenty-five of your own domains. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer License – Can be installed on multiple of your own domains. Install the plugin on any client site for payment or part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: Pricing for the Compliance Bar software depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The above reflects the price at the time this review was written. This may or may not be the actual price set by the plugin seller 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 – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Compliance Bar – Additional Information
Legal Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers state on their website that all legal page templates have already been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for your peace of mind.
For a demo video of the plugin, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, support help desk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
Download This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven sites. We recommend installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For more information, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Disclaimer: Once again, please note that 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 of ensuring that your website is compliant with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.
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