Web Sites - Subject to Advertising Standards from 1st March - check your sites
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2011-02-13 19:18:54 - Graham Ellis
Copyright, Libel, Decency, Incitement, Discrimination, Privacy ... you web sight has had to conform with the law in all those areas and - from 1st March, you can add Advertising Standards to the list. So the site needs to be truthful in its adverting / selling, and not make false claims. I understand that the ASA is taking on more staff to cope with the expected rush of complaints.
What does this mean for the web site owner? Advise is to check that your web site (and advertising emails if you use them!) conform to the same advertising codes that you use in printed adverts and the adverts you get shown on the TV. For those of us who sell predominantly online, we need to be even more stringent in what we write, and to do things like check back for those old offers at old prices that weren't date-limited and may still be in some dusty corner of our web site. Frankly, it's always made good sense (and always been our policy at Well House) to write web site content to the highest standard, so whilst we're taking a careful look, I don't think we'll have much - if anything - to change. And that's on a web site with over 10,000 different URLs [and I can, of course, back that claimed size ;-) ]
Our PHP, Tomcat Deployment, Linux Web Server and Deploying LAMP courses all include a section that introduces the legal considerations of writing / maintaining a web site, and the new ASA stuff will be mentioned in future presentations of the courses. Our course index is [here] - giving upcoming dates and links to agendas for each of these courses.