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.

We Offer Flat Fees for Web Site Auditing
If you wish, we can quote a flat fee for auditing your Web site after we briefly review its extensiveness and complexity. Our quoted flat fee will include our review of your publicly available Web site plus any private areas to which you can provide us online access. This audit does not include what we cannot see online, although we can discuss such issues with you. Our flat fee includes a written report of our review of your site and up to one hour of telephone consultation regarding our findings. After that first hour, we will charge for consultation on an hourly basis. Also, if we perform any services as a result of the report, we will charge for those services on an hourly basis.

Get a Free Copy of Our E-Commerce Outline
We provide our Web site audit clients with a complimentary copy of our then-current outline on E-Commerce legal issues. This outline will not be legal advice targeted to your individual needs, but it will provide useful background on E-Commerce legal issues.

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.