One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to break the law.
Your website has to comply with numerous federal, state and even local laws and regulations, many of which you may not be aware of.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of incurring both 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 post, we review a simple and inexpensive solution for WordPress users that can help make your website fully compliant just minutes.
Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?
As the digital business realm continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules constantly change, it’s important that you stay informed about what’s going on and to make sure that your website remains legal, especially if your web presence is an integral component of your business strategy.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party 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 close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook and many other social sites will suspend your applications, and you won’t be allowed into a range of leading advertising or merchant networks.
If your web presence is not in compliance, you could end up facing a number of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if your business online is 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 policies and guidelines!)
Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice here.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to numerous legal requirements in accordance with federal, state or local laws and regulations that govern your business,
- How important it is to comply with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be promoting or using on your website, and
- There are plugin-based solutions for WordPress users that can help your website become more compliant, such as the solution that we discuss in this article.
If your website or blog is falling short in areas of compliance, below we discuss a simple plugin for WordPress sites you should know more about.
Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your web presence …
Go here to learn more: Compliance Bar
Compliance Bar Plugin Benefits
Below we have listed just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Compliance Bar Plugin to instantly make your web site compliant:
Installation Is Easy
Compliance Bar Plugin installs like any WordPress plugin. Simply upload a zip file containing the plugin to your Plugins folder via your WP dashboard and activate.
Easy-To-Edit Templates
Easily edit the pre-built legal page templates inside Compliance Bar from the settings menu using the WYSIWYG content editor.
24/7 Support
Compliance Bar plugin provides dedicated 24/7 plugin support to help users with anything they need.
Additional benefits and advantages include:
- Customized Compliance Pages: Compliance Bar will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not difficult to use - 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 default templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Use On All WordPress Sites: If your site is built with WordPress, you can use the plugin for all website purposes. Just select the templates you want to include in your site and ignore the irrelevant pages.
Compliance Bar Features
Compliance Bar offers a number of great features to site owners. Below we have listed just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and set up. Ready to go to work in minutes.
- Show Attractive Icons – Compliance Bar will display links to your compliance pages in the form of attractive icons that can be placed on different locations in your page. You can also upload icons of your choice.
- Show Sensitive Content – If your site contains content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, dating, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that require users to accept your terms or disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you are based in Europe or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to be aware of EU compliance requirements. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar that notifies visitors and protects you from non-compliance.
- Records And Stores IP Addresses – Compliance Bar records your visitors’ IP address for reference, just in case a user accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcodes – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes that populate the templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site or blog, (even in the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – Compliance Bar has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and will display mobile optimized icons automatically depending on the web browser being used.
Features – Details
After installing and activating the plugin, you will get access to a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured.
Let’s briefly review these …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this screen where your information can be entered (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Registered Address,” “Location Details,” “Refund Period,” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Website URL,” “Support Desk URL,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Screen – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses dynamic shortcodes to populate the information from your User Profile fields inside your page templates …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) data has been input into the profile fields, users can then access the other plugin section.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” section contains all of your pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Pages – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Last time we checked the Compliance Bar plugin website, there were over 20 legal pages available, addressing all areas of compliance:
- 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
Creating compliance pages for your website or blog can be easily done. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click ”Save” in the “Create Pages” screen …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added under your “Pages” section.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a built-in set of 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: Legal Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Pages
You can easily customize and delete the legal templates in the “Compliance Pages” screen, just like any other WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance 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 you installed the plugin).
Compliance Bar
You have many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, whether to show 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, and more …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create an unlimited number of Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover various 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 3rd-party theme frameworks (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” page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile device 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 using dynamic icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance bar to be featured …
PopUps
If your site includes content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, dating, etc.), you can display popups that blocks access to visitors who do not accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” area lets you fully customize your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
You can create an unlimited number of Pop Ups displaying on different pages, or to cover various uses in different areas of your site …
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 store the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
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 …
The 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 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” tab, lists all of your legal pages and shortcodes, and lets you modify their content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” menu, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
User Testimonials
Below are a couple of the testimonials customers have provided for the Compliance Bar Plugin plugin:
”One of the Best Plugins I Have Used” 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
Useful Tips
Here are some extra ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protection against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages.
- End refund disputes by clearly spelling out the refund terms before purchase.
- If your website published content that is considered inappropriate for underaged viewers, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Compliance Bar Support
Compliance Bar provides users with dedicated plugin support to help users if they experience any difficulties. You also get 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 edition of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hours (Monday to Friday), the plugin developers will refund double the amount of your purchase price.
Plugin Cost
- Single – Can be installed on a single domain. Price = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business License Edition – Install the plugin on up to twenty-five of your own domains. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional License – Install the plugin on all as many of your own sites as you like. Install the plugin on all client sites for payment or as part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Note: Pricing details of Compliance Bar Plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Presently, the product is being retailed for the amounts shown above. This may not be the actual pricing set by the product author when you visit the plugin site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin
Additional Info
Templates Reviewed By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal page templates have 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 a demo video of the plugin in action, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
What We Recommend
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.
For more details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice in this article. 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.
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