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Making your website legally watertight

Business29-Mar-2022

Your business’ website is often the first point of contact between you and your clients. Make sure you have covered all bases in creating a successful website by reading Barbara Jamieson’s article on how to ensure your website is legally watertight.

Did you know there are over 1.8 billion websites on the internet? Regardless of what they do, they will have the same thing in common – they should be: eye-catching, attractive, professional, and legal. This brings me onto this month’s article: Making your website legally watertight. It is my aim to help bridal businesses with an online presence understand what a website needs to be covered from a legal perspective. All websites need legal documents.

The first question is: where on the website should these be? As a rule of thumb, your website documents should be prominent and accessible. The best place for the hyperlinks is the footer of each page so visitors can easily locate essential information.

Website terms

At its most basic level, website terms set your website ground rules and information visitors need to know about you. The terms don’t need to be long, provided you have covered the following points.

Always protect your intellectual property by including a copyright notice. You should state you are the owner (or licensee) of all copyright in the designs, layout, text and photos on your website and visitors are not permitted to do copy, license etc them without your consent.
Be clear that you don’t necessarily endorse links on your website, and you aren’t responsible for what happens when visitors click a link to another website.
Tell visitors they must not commit computer offences, by introducing viruses, and that you’re not liable if they get any viruses from your website.
You should add disclaimers, telling visitors you can’t guarantee your website will always be accurate, available, or up to date and that you’re not liable to them for any errors or downtime.
As with every contract, always include a governing law clause, stating which law governs your terms and which court has the right to hear any claims. This will typically be the laws of the country in which you are located.

Where your website operates an online shop, your terms should also include information about your goods and shop, as follows:

Give your VAT registration number, if applicable.
Tell customers about their consumer rights (such as the right to a cooling off period).
There should always be a number of disclaimers to protect you. For instance, explain that the colour in photos may differ from the real product and that you try to keep prices accurate, but you can’t guarantee it.
You should set out your delivery and returns policies within the terms, or you can have these on separate pages if you would prefer.

Privacy and cookies policy

A privacy and cookies policy is a GDPR must! Within this policy, you’re telling visitors and your customers about the personal data you collect from them when they do such things as:

Use your website
Contact you
Subscribe to your newsletter
Make a purchase on your website.

You’ll also need to explain why you collect personal data and what you do with it. There are six legal reasons for collecting personal data and the most commonly relied on are that you need the personal data to fulfil your contract with them (i.e., complete the order), they have consented by contacting you, or it is in your legitimate interest to contact them with relevant goods or products. You should also add the contact details of your data protection officer (if you have one) and confirm you’re registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

You should also set out your policy on cookies. Cookies are small text files placed on visitors’ devices when they visit your website so that they are remembered next time they visit. The purpose is to make a visitor’s experience more efficient and most website collect these. Cookies can be used for targeted advertising via third party cookies. You need to be super careful of these and disclose to visitors if you use them. This is because they are collected by third parties, such as Google (via Google Ads) and Meta (via the Meta pixel). If you’re not sure, ask your marketing or website development team.

Cookies consent banner

As your website will use cookies, GDPR also requires you to include a cookies consent banner. This gives visitors the chance to reject cookies if they want to, although they may not receive the full website experience without cookies. If you don’t have a cookies consent banner, have a word with your website developer who could add this for you.

Copyright notice

Final Tips

As a parting note, these are my final tips:

Keep an eye on data protection requirements as these often change and you need to be ready.
Every few months, do a quick refresh of your website documents and add the month and year (‘Last updated April 2022’). On a subconscious level, visitors are more likely to infer that you’re on the ball by actively managing your website and get a feeling of confidence in you.
Make a list of any issues you have had with customers and think about addressing these in your terms update. This will prevent the same thing from happening and save you time overall.
Undertake a review of the personal data you collect and what you do with it, so that you can reflect this in the policy. If you share data with a third party, be sure to say this.

At Jamieson Law, we pride ourselves on helping small businesses understand their legal obligations and trying to make everything less daunting. This includes drafting website documents, fixed fee contract reviews and contract drafting services.

If you feel like you could benefit from some one-to-one advice, please take advantage of our free 15-minute legal advice calls.

These are not sales calls; just our way of giving back to the business community. You can book a slot here.