In many ways, it is your website that legitimises and kick-starts a business in its early stages. Once you have your website, you can direct people to it, you can print your business cards, you can link it up to your Gmail and have your “@business.com” email address. Even if a shiny website suddenly means you have a successful business, getting a website for a lot of entrepreneurs is actually an incredibly significant step. Once it’s done it feels fantastic. And you just need to ensure that it is legally compliant and does not expose your business to any risk.

Here are the 3 key things you need to legalise your landing page:

1. Create your GDPR compliant privacy policy

   We set out full GDPR information in our GDPR for startups guide on our Knowledge page. However, let’s just cut to the bottom line and ignore all the fluff and fear mongering you’ve heard. 

   What you need to do is:

   1. Be transparent with the info you collect, and why and how you do it. Detail it in a GDPR compliant privacy policy. 

   2. Get consent to send marketing/advertising. Use a tick box when you collect an email address and keep separate mailing lists.

   3. Hold data securely. Use reputable software systems and don’t leave confidential information lying around. 

For the purposes of your website, having a good, thorough privacy policy is a good approach to take, and it also will help focus your mind on your own business. You’ll be able to actually list out the information you collect and why, and that’s actually a useful internal-facing piece of analysis. 

Create your GDPR compliant privacy policy here. 

2. Get your Website Terms of Use 

Terms of Use are effectively your agreement between your business and your visitors or users, etc. By agreeing to your company Terms of Use, your visitors or users are formally creating a contract with your company and agreeing to follow the terms, rules and guidelines for using your website, mobile app or web-based platform.

To set up your landing page and protect it from any general website related liability (e.g. if you put advice/blogs out on it, viruses which could become linked to your site, or hackers getting into your site and inserting harmful links which visitors then click on) – create your company T&Cs here.


3. Make sure you sell and be forward-looking, but be truthful

As a general rule, you should make sure that your website doesn’t contain information which is false or misleading generally. Regardless of whether you have good legal documents in place, there are still laws which supersede your contracts which can land you in trouble if you are putting forward incorrect information to visitors or users to your website, mobile application or web-based platform.

No doubt this is unlikely to be an issue, but just something to bear in mind. 

You can create your Privacy Policy and Website Terms of use on Legal Sidekick here.

This article was written by Legal Sidekick. Legal Sidekick is the legal platform for startups. We offer automated contracts and loads of startup legal resources and guides. For 'hire a freelancer' queries, please contact us at hey@legalsidekick.com.