Your Website Trilogy of Legal Documents: Creating Trust, Legal Protection and Compliance - Part II Essential Terms of Use

This is the second part of a 3-part blog series on protecting your website. You can read Part I ~ Privacy Policies Here. 

If you have a website for your online business, it’s no doubt a source of enormous business pride. You’ve probably spent countless hours creating content, and if you’re like many online entrepreneurs, you’ve probably spent even more countless hours learning the basics of website design and getting your website up and running. As you build out more and more pages over time, you are creating an extremely valuable business asset. As with all assets of your business, you’ll want to provide it with as much legal protection as you can. If you’re an online course creator or online coach, run an online membership or offer custom services online, you use your website content to engage with your customers and market your products and services. To build trust and confidence with your website visitors, who one day will hopefully become your customers, and to ensure your website is legally compliant, you’ll need certain documents in place on your website for visitors to access. There are three must-have policies for your website: a privacy policy, terms and conditions of use and a disclaimer. In this blog we’ll cover the importance of having website terms of use, also called website terms and conditions, what's typically included in the website terms or use document, why it’s essential for your business to have one and some of the risks you take by not having terms and conditions on your website. Last week we took a deep dive into website privacy policies, and you can find the link to that blog at Part I - Bulletproofing your Website with a Comprehensive Privacy Policy. Next week we’ll take a look at the third and final critical website document - the website disclaimer.

Your website terms of use, sometimes called website terms and conditions, creates a legally binding agreement between you as the business and website owner and visitors to your website. Although website terms of use are not legally required in the way that website privacy policies are, adopting them for your website is definitely a sound business decision. As you build out your business and create valuable content for your customers, you’ll want your visitors to understand the boundaries that apply to consuming your content and engaging with your website. Identifying your website terms and conditions not only manages expectations with your visitors and informs them about how they may consume your content, but provides you with tools you may need later to enforce your policies in the event of misuse. Remember also that some visitors to your website will never become your customers. Even if you have terms and conditions that apply to your paid products, your website still contains proprietary information and content that you need to protect. Your website terms of use let all visitors of your website know how they can and can’t use your content, whether or not they are your customer.

Essential Elements of Website Terms and Conditions

Here are some of the key categories of provisions to consider including in your website terms of use.

User Responsibilities:

This category covers the obligations of your website visitors to act in acceptable ways while visiting your website. This category might include affirmative and negative obligations, such as compliance with laws, maintaining account security, rules about any materials they upload or share and refraining from illegal activity.

Intellectual Property Rights:

Your intellectual property is the lifeblood of your business. Your terms of use should clearly state that all intellectual property on your website, including trademarks, copyrights and other proprietary rights belong to you as the owner of the website. You should explain how visitors can use your website content as well as what they are not allowed to do with it. For example, your visitors may download free content and utilize it personally but not modify, share or resell it. 

Payments and Refunds.

Though more detail about these topics should appear in the terms of use for your course, program or service, you’ll want your website terms and conditions to outline your payment terms, how payments are accepted, and how you handle refunds. If your refund policies vary from product to product, you should tell visitors that your refund policies will be explained in the terms and conditions for each course or product. Payments are probably one of the most common areas for misunderstandings and disputes between businesses and their customers, so providing clarity on these points in your terms and conditions puts you, as the business owner, in the best position legally. Providing clear information on these topics also helps your customers make informed buying decisions and helps you build trust and confidence with them. 

Prohibited Conduct:

Although it may seem obvious that your website visitors shouldn’t engage in inappropriate behavior on your website, your terms and conditions will want to be specific about this. Even beyond the most egregious conduct, such as hacking or disrupting the website’s functionality, your website terms of use should also remind visitors that they may not copy your content or violate the privacy of other users.

Limit Your Liability:

Your website terms and conditions should clearly state that you are not making any warranties and that you are not liable for any damages or injuries that could arise from using your website or content. You’ll want to include language that disclaims as much liability as possible under applicable laws. 

Disclaimers:

We’ll discuss disclaimers in more detail below, but your website terms of use should also contain important disclaimers. For example, your website content might be for educational and informational purposes only and your users should know that they are taking responsibility for any actions they do or don’t take after visiting your website. 

Dispute Resolution:

Your website terms and conditions should inform visitors about how disputes will be resolved. You might limit dispute resolution to arbitration or require disputes be brought in a specific state convenient to where you and your business are located. 

Identification of Your Rights:

Be sure to put your website visitors on notice that you reserve the right to moderate content on the site and terminate their access to your courses and programs if they fail to meet community standards or if they engage in conduct that violates your terms of use. 

Contact Information:

Your website term of use should provide contact information for someone at your organization that can respond to any questions they may have. 

Update and Refresh the Date:

You should update your terms of use periodically as your business practices and policies change. You may change how you accept payments, your refund policies or you may even relocate your business to another state. Your website terms and conditions are a living document that you should review and revise periodically. 

Link Up Your Other Policies:

Each of your website policies should contain links to your other policies - your privacy policy and disclaimer. Your policies should work together and not conflict with one another. By keeping each of your website policies in separate documents, you make your visitors aware of the different categories of policies you have on your website and make it easier for your visitors to locate your policies. 

Summary of Website Essential Terms and Conditions

Getting your online course or coaching business, membership site or custom services off the ground is an amazing feeling. You put your heart and soul into getting your business designed and your website launched.  This milestone, like all the milestones you reach in your business, calls for a legal checkup to ensure you’ve thought through how this step in your business could benefit from legal protection. You want your business to sit on a solid foundation so that it can grow and develop and expand to all of the products and services you want to offer within it, some of which you can’t yet even envision. Legally protecting your website is a foundational step you can take today to help ensure the stability and growth of your business. By adopting a privacy policy, website terms of use and a disclaimer, the three essential documents your website needs to be legally protected, you’ll be well on your way to building trust and transparency with your customers, legally protecting your website and meeting your legal compliance obligations. 

Does your website have the triad of legal documents it needs? Check out the Website Bundle over in the Step Up Your Legal™ Template Shop to get the privacy policy, website terms of use and disclaimer you need today.