Recently I talked about setting up a contact page for your website which I think is pretty important. It allows readers to contact you easily and without it, frankly it looks like you might not want to be bothered with correspondence, and this is no way to run an online publishing business. So be sure to get that contact page up and running.
Along with this, there are several other pages, or information that needs to be incorporated into your website fairly early on. You see, we have a couple of goals with our site. One is to generate leads on interested folks that sign up for our email or newsletter list. Doing so will make it a lot easier to keep in touch with tips, suggestions, product recommendations, etc. But in order to acquire these emails in a legit and honorable way, you’ll want to include a privacy policy page on your website. You can do a google search for ideas on what this should contain, but suffice it to say that there should be some promise of security for the reader.
In addition to this, you will likely want to include ads or Google Adsense on your site for monetary purposes. If you do, you’ll need to provide a clear disclaimer of your affiliate relationships and Google requires that you include an opt out code for folks that don’t want to see Adwords ads. It should go something like this.
Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to your website.
Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and/or other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the advertising opt-out page.
Some publishers include all the important information in a “Disclaimer” page, while others may create a Privacy or Legal page separately. Anything is acceptable as long as it contains key information. Do create this type of page, I’d suggest searching on Google for disclaimer page templates, or examples as well as privacy policy templates and see if you can come up with something that suits your needs. Most likely you will. You can also visit sites like this one and many others to get an idea of what these pages should contain.
Creating Links For Your Important Pages
Once you’ve got the legal page or pages set up you’ll want to include a link to them in your site template. You can certainly include them in the main link menu at the top if wish, but I generally like to insert them in the footer area instead. In the lower right hand corner of this site you’ll see these links.
How you integrate these into a particular theme, but usually it’s just a matter of putting some link code in place of some existing text. The video below will show you how to do this fairly easily and I would say this is normally about the only time you’ll need to mess around with any actual coding in a WordPress based site.
Here’s some sample code you could copy and paste into your template editor to make the changes on your website.
<p><a href=””>Privacy Policy</a> – <a href=””>Disclaimer</a> – <a href=””>Contact Us</a></p>
You would put the actual url or webpage address between the ” “, and you can change the text of the active links if you don’t like the terms Privacy Policy, Disclaimer, or Contact Us…there’s no problem in doing that whatsoever. In simple terms the coding here will create an active link to the url you include and the link will state whatever term you put before theclosing tag.
Sometimes it’s a little difficult to figure out what code to replace in the footer area but after a little digging around you can usually get pretty good at finding it. Some of the purchased templates allow you to modify this without digging into the code as well. In our video here I show you how to modify the default template in WordPress and it’s not hard to do at all. Just follow along and you should have your template updated in no time at all.