Your terms and conditions, which are published on your website, are extremely important.
And yet, there are sites out there, some of which I'm ashamed to say have been created by me, which have very broad generic terms or even none at all.
And in almost every case that I can remember, the copy for the terms and conditions page of a website is the very last one sent by the client. People seem to forget, or simply ignore, just how important the terms and conditions are.
The wise client has their terms and conditions written by their attorney. Your attorney knows exactly how to phrases your terms correctly and knows exactly what ought to be included.
I think that sometimes people forget that, once their website is live, it can be accessed by anyone from anywhere in the world. Your copy or images can be stolen. Your ideas and philosophies can be copied. All your hard work can just be nicked by someone who couldn't be bothered to work themselves.
In out long history, we have found images which are our copyright on other websites. We get them removed, of course. We have also found a site which had just copied and pasted our home page text. We have found that our website coding has been used on other sites.
In these eventualities, we contact the people concerned and the offending items are swiftly removed. But you don't want that hassle - even if you DO find them, which is unlikely.
But it gets a lot worse. People can, and will, sue you. Or at least demand compensation. That is, if your website has any information on there that's out of date or incorrect.
Let's take a restaurant site as an example. You say on your site that your restaurant is open for dinner every evening. A couple drive fifty miles to your place one Sunday and find a sign on the door saying that you close on Sunday evenings. Don't you think it's likely that they might want you to compensate you for the gas money?
Depending on your business, you may have customer terms, return policies, disclaimers, privacy policies and a lot more legal stuff that I can't bring to mind right now.
So please don't ignore your terms and conditions page and think that it isn't important. It is.
Comments