Protecting Your Investment

Protecting Your Investment

In addition to providing your visitors with Help and FAQ content, you might also want to outline a few rules for the use of your website, and disclose how you intend on handling personal customer information.  You’ve probably run into a few of these online policies yourself, or maybe you had to quickly scan through them in order to sign up for Internet access, or to use a particular type of software. Here’s what you need in your own.

Terms of Service Policy

By outlining how your website may be used with a Terms of Service Policy, you’re legally protecting all the hard work you’ve done. For example, you may want to explain your copyrights, or inform others on how they may use some of your content for personal reasons or publication.

Privacy Policy

Disclosing how you intend on handling personal customer information with a Privacy Policy will give visitors a heads up on what they need to do to protect themselves. In some cases, merchants simply stash customer information into a database some place where it’ll never be seen again. But in other cases, merchants send customer information to other merchants as part of a marketing swap. Rules which explain how customer information is kept, shared, and/or disclosed helps visitors determine whether they want to do business with you.

Essentially, you want your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to explain:

• Your rights to change the content on your website (at your will)
• That you’re not responsible for any particular injuries or damages that a visitor may incur from using your website
• Your claim to copyrights, patents, and other protected material
• Your exemption from the merchantability, fitness, availability or usability of the website
• That you’re not responsible for the content arising from 3rd party links
• Which state and court of law in which the items of this policy are upheld

That sounds pretty restrictive, but your explanations are there to protect you. In recent Internet history, a group of handicapped persons attempted to sue a well-known website for failing to provide an accessible website. Don’t let this happen to you. Outline what is and isn’t permissible.