All posts filed under: Online business

The perils for plugin businesses with no or minimal terms of use

Published by Richard Best

WordPress is a fantastic content management system. In the some 18 years that I’ve been using it, I’ve seen it go from a glorified blogging engine to a fully fledged content management system. I’ve seen the development and growth of theme and plugin businesses, and I’ve witnessed and contributed to the often arcane debates about the GPL. Through this site, I’ve also tried to help WordPress theme and plugin businesses with the various legal issues that can crop up in the use of WordPress and the running of their businesses. I will soon be launching my own plugin business. The plugins that will be available for purchase all revolve around Gravity Forms (an awesome plugin that I’ve been using since 2010). If you’d like to be told when I launch, feel free to sign up here: In the past I whipped up an automated terms of use builder for theme and plugin businesses (you had to purchase the ‘business package’ of A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL to get access), and I’m using …

Attention WordPress course creators – mad cyber week deal on The 5-Step Legal Plan for Online Course Creators

Published by Richard Best

I suspect many of us, myself included, are now suffering from Black Friday to Cyber Monday fatigue. So I’ll keep this brief. For a very limited time, I’m offering full access to The 5-Step Legal Plan for Online Course Creators for the madly discounted price of $29. That’s a whopping 66% off the normal price. The course helps you to protect your course content, avoid being sued, comply with important laws, and keep what you earn in your pocket, in under 90 minutes! This includes walking you through quick and automated creation of your own copyright statement, disclaimer, terms of use, and privacy statement. Oh, and you’ll get all 6 of our ebooks too, which cover protecting your course content, using others’ content safely, licensing content to get promotion, mastering your email marketing, having a privacy statement, and shielding yourself from lawsuits. This deal will never be repeated again, so be quick. There’s never been a better time or place for course creators to get their legal house in order. GET THE DEAL HERE AND NOW, before it …

What all online course creators need to know about the legal stuff

Published by Richard Best

“Make sure you get the legal stuff right with your online course.” “Huh?”, the course creator responds. “What do I need to know, and why?” It’s all too easy for course creators to come up with and validate a great idea, create their course, get on with their marketing, and whack their course up on a course platform, without giving much if any thought to the legal stuff. Unfortunately, not getting the legal stuff right – getting the legal stuff wrong – can have very negative consequences. With that in mind, and to help you start thinking about the things you need to know, I’ve whipped up “17 practical legal steps to help you create great course content, protect yourself, and keep your money”. It’s free, and you can find it on Law of Course (just scroll to the bottom). Hope you find it useful.

A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL – now available – 30% introductory discount

Published by Richard Best

Finally… I’m pleased to be able to say that A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL is now out in the wild. You can find it right here. Outline Here’s a quick outline of the chapters: 1. Introduction: conception, birth and forking 2. Understanding the GPL licensing of WordPress 3. Common GPL-related questions 4. WordPress themes, the GPL and the conundrum of derivative works 5. The GPL and assumptions of automatic inheritance 6. Theme reviews, CC0, model releases and GPL-compatibility 7. Selling ThemeForest themes outside of ThemeForest 8. Reselling commercial plugins 9. The GPL and trademarks 10. Theme and plugin shop terms of use versus GPL freedoms Packages Three different packages, or editions, are on offer: 1. The business package If you’re into the business of developing WordPress themes or plugins (or both), you might want this package. You’ll get: the ebook (PDF) of A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL; a professionally narrated audio book, enabling you to listen to the book when you’re on the go (narrated by Steve Chase); and …

Click to accept processes: a closer look at Gravity Perks

Published by Richard Best

Context As you might have gathered from some of my earlier posts, I’m a big fan of Gravity Forms, a fantastic plugin that just gets better and better with the passage of time. I’ve used Gravity Forms in the past to create ‘click to accept’ mechanisms but, at least as I’ve deployed them, they required inclusion of a link to terms of use which would then open up in a new window or tab (for anyone who bothered to read them). With this approach the terms themselves weren’t visible on the same page as the click to accept box. Legally this wasn’t a problem but perhaps it wasn’t the most user-friendly approach. In Legal checks when building a content-driven WordPress website I mentioned that you could go one step further by purchasing and installing the Gravity Perks plugin which includes a GP Terms of Service Perk. I noticed that this add-on for Gravity Forms helpfully adds a Terms of Service field to the available Advanced Fields and can produce something like this: At that point …

Protecting WordPress consultancies with terms of business

Published by Richard Best

Let’s take a look at WordPress consultancies As readers will know, the WordPress marketplace comprises a wide range of business types, including: development and design agencies; theme and plugin shops; website generation platforms; app platforms; and consultancy businesses. For this post I want to focus on the last of these: WordPress consultancy businesses. These are the sorts of businesses that provide the likes of: commercial advice and coaching in relation to WordPress-related businesses (think Chris Lema); advice and training materials on how to “become an exceptional WordPress consultant” (WP Elevation) or on how to “kickstart your WordPress business” (Matt Report Pro); and WordPress workshop and on-site training services (like BobWP). These kinds of businesses do not necessarily provide any development or design services (they may do as separate services but that’s not my focus here). Rather, their services are more commercial, strategic or educational in nature. If you own or work for such a WordPress consultancy, you may have asked yourself about the kind of contractual terms you should be putting in place with your …

How lawyers’ terms for your WordPress business can affect your revenue

Published by Richard Best

So you’re starting an online business You’re starting a WordPress-related business of some sort. You need website terms of use or a privacy policy or software-as-a-service terms for the site. You ask your lawyer to whip something up so that that particular box can be ticked off: “Terms of use, done”. You might be someone who works closely with your lawyer on such issues or you may give your lawyer comparatively free reign. Does it matter? I suggest it does, as I’ll try to show in this post. Three “stories”, if you like, have prompted me to write this post: a story about Pinterest and its early terms of use; a story about some client feedback I had a while ago; and a story about the Envato Studio terms of use as described in Taking care with the IP terms of WordPress development services. I’ll tell the three stories shortly but the point of this post is that the the manner in which lawyers (or others) draft terms of use and other legal terms for …