Defining your website terms and condiitions

I assume that some people on here have defined terms and conditions on their websites. How did you come to define it? Did you hire a lawyer to help draft one up or go online and find a template that you leveraged?

Any input is greatly appreciated.

There are several legal aspects to be considered to ensure that a website runs legally and securely, and that best interests of the business are served. From my experienceone needs to have is very diligently drafted legal documentation on your website. Your website shall have all the required disclaimers of regulating Acts and/or agencies, and in the right format.

The legal documentation for every website is specific depending on particular governing law and functionality. Mere copy paste of legal documentation can be a vulnerable threat to your web based business. You should also include clauses which most of them ignore like Notification Changes, Refund Policy etc.

This is a little open ended, as a lot will determine what the terms and conditions cover, if we are talking about a brochure site for your company then their are loads of boiler templates which when combined with your privacy policy should work well enough.

If you are running a site with a free or paid for service and expect users to sign up and the TOC are for both the site and this service then it's a different ball game. There are lots of templates out their but it's worth running anything like that past a lawyer, especially if you are unsure of small changes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Also rarely are two services alike so changes will have to be made, again this is something you can do, or pass it to a lawyer to look at.

If you site is a pure E-commerce store then again their are hundreds of templates out there and assuming your TOS do not outline any after sales or warranty conditions should be straight forward and a boiler template should cover it, but again it comes back to any doubts or worries and assuming you have the money to consult a lawyer.

When I was first starting up I had a friend who had just completed law school and bartered for his time to help look over documents, if you know someone in a similar position even if you decide to go down the template route it's worth letting them read it. This is not a substitue for getting a lawyer to draft anything, but at least is better then having a sit around and dreaming up legalease sounding words.

n.b I am not a lawyer.

The folks at Automattic (makers of WordPress) have a very useful Terms of Service template here:

http://en.wordpress.com/tos/ It's available under a liberal Creative Commons license. We use it for status.net, in a slightly modified form.