When creating a disclaimer for your website, you should focus on the information that is unique to your site. However, you can escape legal responsibility in many situations by including a properly worded disclaimer on your website.
Website disclaimers often serve one of two purposes:
1) to absolve the hosting site or its owners of any obligation or liability, or
2) to minimise or disavow any responsibility or involvement with the subject matter at hand. If you are looking for a professional website development company than you can contact Web Development India with talented team of website developers and web designers.
It is possible to limit the kind of legal action that site users can take against the site owners by placing such text on the site. As such, you can conceive of them as mandated by law.
First and foremost, you need to know what kind of legal exposure you or your company have in order to write an effective disclaimer. This is conditional on the nature and actions of the website.
Do you have any how-to guides or other pieces of advise on your website? Claims based on visitors’ good faith reliance on such material or advice might result in liability for your website.
If a visitor to your health-related website suffers an injury as a result of following the recommendations or information provided there, you might face a negligence claim.
The accuracy or dependability of your website’s material is an important basic disclaimer that all websites providing information or guidance should have. Visitors should understand that they are using the site at their own risk and that you offer no guarantees about the site’s dependability as part of a standard website usage disclaimer.
To give one example of a disclaimer that is relevant just to my website, I state that reading my blog does not create an attorney-client relationship.
Any disclaimer on a website is only as effective as the writing and the visibility of the disclaimer to site visitors.
Every disclaimer you publish on your website has to include specific wording that addresses the activities you conduct and the intended purposes of any content you post.
Positioning of disclaimers on websites is crucial.
When deciding whether or not to issue an injunction, the court will look at both the content of your website and where and how you provide your disclaimer. Accordingly, it is equally as crucial to strategically post a disclaimer on a website as it is to design an appropriate disclaimer in the first place.
However, courts will always consider the intent behind the posting of any website disclaimer, regardless of the area of law to which the disclaimer relates.
spectrum of effectiveness?
Given the lack of definitive guidelines, a liability spectrum may be useful when considering where to add disclaimers on a website. The safest course of action is to redirect all visitors to a special page (a “splash page”) that displays your disclaimers.
Before proceeding with their use of the content on your site, each visitor will have had a full opportunity to read and understand the disclaimer. The visitor’s action may lend credence to your claim that they accepted the conditions of the disclaimer.
This option is not desirable from a business standpoint. The length of time it takes customers to find what they need can have a significant impact on conversion rates.
The most permissive approach is to bury any necessary disclaimers in the website’s terms of service or on a separate page accessible via some inconspicuous link in the website footer.
Because of this, your disclaimers may go unnoticed by site visitors unless they accidentally click on one of the links. This undermines any argument that your company had good intentions when it came to the issue of the website disclaimer.
A court may rule that a disclaimer was unnecessary because of this. There’s a chance that no one will click on the disclaimer link.
The compromise is to make it clear to visitors that disclaimers exist, in some way. One such method is to include a link to your disclaimer in a highly visible location on your website (one that users won’t have to scroll down to reach). Another common practise is to prominently display a disclaimer on each page of the website where the disclaimer applies.
This approach is more suited for more targeted disclaimers, such as those addressing the veracity of material or responsibility, rather than more generic disclaimers.
Last but not least, you might put a broad website disclaimer in the terms of service itself.
Simply having a disclaimer on your website is not enough to protect you legally.
Finally, keep in mind that there is zero assurance that including a disclaimer on your website will protect you from legal action. This is the case even if you had a lawyer specialising in online business create each disclaimer for your website.
Each finding of responsibility by a court of law will be based on its own evaluation of the facts and circumstances surrounding the situation or asserted claim. However, a website disclaimer that does its job well might be a determining factor.