One of the worst things that can happen to a website owner is to suddenly discover that you have broken 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 incurring serious financial losses and the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this post, we look at a simple and very inexpensive solution for WordPress users that can help make your website compliant just minutes.
Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?
As the cybersphere continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s important that you stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your website or blog remains legal, especially if your web presence is an integral part of your overall business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not allow you to list your digital products for sale, PayPal may shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will suspend your apps, and you will not be allowed into various leading advertising or merchant networks.
Plus, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.
At the very least, if your digital presence is not in compliance, it could impact on your visitors trust and confidence in doing any future business with you.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party services require you to comply with their policies!)
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice here.
The purpose of this article is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to numerous legal requirements in accordance with the laws that govern your business (some of which you may probably not even be aware of),
- How important it is to remain compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are offering or using in your website, and
- There are cost-effective solutions that can help your site become more compliant, such as the tool that we review in this article.
In this article, we review a total compliance and disclaimer plugin for your digital business.
Announcing …
Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
The Compliance Bar Plugin For WordPress is a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your digital business …
Go here to learn more: Compliance Bar Plugin
Benefits
Here we have listed just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar Plugin to instantly make your website or blog legally compliant:
Easy To Install
Compliance Bar Plugin installs like any regular plugin. Simply upload a zip folder that contains the plugin files to your Plugin folder via your admin login and activate.
Easy-To-Edit Templates
You can easily edit the default legal templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu with the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.
Dedicated 24/7 Plugin Support Team
Compliance Bar plugin provides a dedicated team to help you with anything you need.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Customized Compliance Templates: The Compliance Bar plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Complete Video Training Manuals: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use and a complete library of training videos is available.
- 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 the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever your business is located.
- Use For All Website Purposes: As long as your site is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for every website purpose. Just select the templates you want to add to your site and leave out irrelevant pages.
Features
Compliance Bar Plugin offers many features to WP users. Here are just a few of these:
- Fast and easy to install and use. Be up and running in no time.
- Display Visually Appealing Icons – Display links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations on your page. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Display Restricted Information – If you plan to publish content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult, etc.), you can display popups that force users to accept your site’s terms or 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 that notifies your users and covers you from non-compliance issues.
- Record And Store IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar can record the IP addresses of your visitors for future reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they didn’t.
- Shortcodes – Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to automatically populate compliance pages with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your website, (even in the pop-ups).
- Compatible With Mobile Devices – The plugin has settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and can display mobile optimized icons automatically based on visitor mobile browsers.
Using Compliance Bar Plugin
Once you have installed the Compliance Bar plugin, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured is added to your WordPress admin area.
Let’s briefly review these pages …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this area where your business information can be entered (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Support Desk URL,” “Contact Phone,” “Product Name,” 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 populate and display the information from your User Profile inside your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Image source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) information has been input into the plugin settings fields, you can then access the other plugin screens.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area contains all of the plugin’s legal template pages …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Templates – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Here’s the complete list of legal templates made available by the plugin when we last 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
- XXX Disclosure
You can easily and quickly create compliance pages for your website or blog by simply selecting check boxes and clicking the “Save” button in the “Create Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Page Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to your “Pages” section.
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 Plugin: Legal Page Icons – Image source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Page Templates
You can easily customize and delete the legal page templates in the “Compliance Pages” tab, just like any other page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing 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 you installed the plugin).
Compliance Bar
You have various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including position, whether to display 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 front 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 a number of Compliance Bars to show different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover a range of uses throughout your site.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the main page of your site, even if you are using particular WordPress theme frameworks (like Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is configured through the theme itself as a built-in template, and not as a “regular” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile devices, 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 will display links to your compliance pages using a visually appealing icon bar on your site …
You have full control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance bar to display …
PopUps
If you plan to show content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, dating, etc.), Compliance Bar can display popups that blocks access to visitors who do not accept your terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” area 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 various uses in other areas of your website …
You can also set a delay time to prevent a Pop Up from displaying as soon as visitors arrive, set cookie durations 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 – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
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 …
The Compliance Bar plugin lets you customize 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 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” 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 …
Testimonials
Here are just a few of the testimonials and feedback customers have submitted regarding Compliance Bar Plugin:
”I got a chance to review the Compliance Bar plugin…WOW!! I have to say that its definitely one of the most NECESSARY, yet easiest to use plugin’s to hit the scene in a while. Very Solid Product. Great job Anton & team!” Shon Chris – Director (JV Peer Group)
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”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)
Useful Tips
Below are a few additional ways to use Compliance Bar:
- Protection against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Display compliance icons only on specific pages of your website.
- Reduce refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before customers purchase.
- If you have adult content on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Support
Compliance Bar provides users with dedicated support to help users with anything they need. Users also have access to video training.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, thirty 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 hrs (M – F), the plugin developers will refund twice the amount of the purchasing price.
Software Cost
- Single Edition – Install the plugin on a single site that you own. Price = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business License Edition – Can be installed on 25 of your own domains. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Developer Licensing – Can be installed on multiple as many of your own sites as you need. Install the plugin on all client sites as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Note: The price of this product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The pricing shown above was correct at the time this review was written. This may not be the actual price set by the software developer when you visit the plugin site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Additional Information
Legal Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assure users on their website that all legal page templates have been reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get advice from a qualified legal expert in your area for your own peace of mind.
For demo videos showing plugin usage, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
In Conclusion
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress websites. We recommend downloading and installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice here. 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 in your country or region.
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