Your website and the law

Added on: Tuesday 24th February 2009

Besides the obvious one of making sure you own the copyright (or are licensing it) on all content on your website there are several other issues you need to be aware of - even on the smallest website.

I went to an interesting seminar last week that discussed the legal issues involved with setting up and running a website.

In addition to copyright, you will need to think about disability discrimination - (can disabled users get access to the same material as anyone else?), data protection - (are you processing personal information on your site - the answer is probably yes!), email marketing - (do you have an opt IN policy and not an opt OUT for anyone signing up to receive newsletters or other correspondence?) .

You also need to make sure that there are contact details somewhere on the site and for companies the registration and VAT numbers should be displayed.

See these sites for more information:

Information Commissioners Office

The Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive 2003

Web accessibility

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