What is a Web Site Audit?
In a Web site audit, we review your Web site and provide you with a written assessment of how well it complies with E-Commerce laws and guidelines. We also provide advice on how to change your site to comply with current E-Commerce laws and how to be prepared for possible changes in the law.

Why You Should Care:

• Get Ready for the Great Privacy Blow-Up. A Great Privacy Blowup may occur someday someone will leak embarrassing information gathered online and, as a result, Congress will rush to enact comprehensive online privacy laws. When that happens, businesses that have been handling online privacy in accordance with industry guidelines may be able to continue to use the data they have gathered online. On the other hand, businesses that have not handled online data in accordance with industry guidelines may be forced to scrap their data and build again. Despite the importance of this issue, most businesses do not handle it well, so their data is at risk. Will your business be a winner or a loser when the Great Privacy Blowup occurs?
• Creating Enforceable Online Terms and Conditions. Perhaps you wish to impose terms and conditions on your Web site visitors or online customers. Such conditions might include copyright notices, disclaimers, privacy policies and deep-linking prohibitions. To do so, you need to comply with Federal Trade Commission guidelines, court rulings, digital signature laws and (in Virginia) the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act. Does your site comply?
• E-Commerce Provides So Many Ways to be E-Wrong. New legal requirements for Web sites and E-Commerce emerge almost daily. In a Web site audit, some of the areas we examine are: compliance with privacy laws for regulated areas (health and medical information, targeting kids under 13, consumer financial transactions); use of the U.S. Safe harbor to the EU Privacy Directive (it may apply to your US business); advice on the legality of Web traffic-building techniques (such as deep linking, spamming, metatagging, framing, spidering, ad-linking); intellectual property protection of Web site content; and the use of electronic signatures.

Maintaining Your Web Site
Web sites change over time, and E-Commerce law evolves quickly. Thus, you should have periodical legal maintenance performed on your Web site to keep it in compliance. We can discuss implementing a legal maintenance plan for your Web site and flat fees for performing that service. As a maintenance client, we will provide you with updates of our E-Commerce Outline when we revise it from time to time.

For more information on Web site audits, please contact Dominic Madigan.