Web Design: Legal and Ethical Issues!

Introduction
Well as with most Media products you need to take Legal and Ethical issues into consideration. This is because you don't want to get into trouble for not taking these necessary precautions, as you can get prosecuted and / or fined. As well breaking the Law you could possible have some Ethical issues with people trying to use your website, they could offend people, mislead people or people could struggle to use your website if they have a disability.

Copyright
Again as with most Media products you need to make sure that all of the content of your website is your own work. This means that all your text and images are all created and made by you, and if they're not get permission to use these on your website.

The way something is Copyrighted is when you create an original piece of work, whether it be an image, text or video it is automatically Copyrighted to you. Now to show that it has been Copyrighted to you can may use symbols that signify that it has been, the symbols are a Trademark symbol (™) at the bottom of your website (™ 2013, Daniel Holden), Copyright symbol (©) at the bottom of your website (© 2013, Daniel Holden) and by using Watermarks, these are where you place your logo or name over an image at a lower opacity.

Ethical Issues
As mentioned above you don't really want to offend anyone as that will lose your audience. So you need to take into consideration everything that makes every person, that is Race, Gender, Sexuality and Religion. This is where you need to represent everyone equally and fairly. Now if you have images on your site you need to make sure they are decent for your audience as you don't want to have a childrens website with indecent images on as this could offend the audience.

Web Accessibility
When you are creating your website it has to be accessable by everyone, since everyone is different you never know what disabilities they might have.

Visual Disability
The visually disabled can range from being colour blind to full blind, this means that they may struggle to see parts of the screen or not see it at all. So you will need to make sure that you cater for this, if they're colour blind you will need to make sure that the colours are not too similar so they don't combine together and make it more difficult to see. For the fully blind you will have to make sure that the wording that is being used is Standard English and that it's easily read by using a Screen Reader which is where the program reads the words for you.

Hearing Disability
If a user is going to be Deaf then this can become an issue with websites that use sound or videos. So try to limit the use of these so people with hearing disabilities don't have an issue with listening to the,m. This does come into play with Blind people also as they cannot see the video being played so if possible try to get a video with Audio Description.

Physical Disabilities
If a user a physically disabled then this may mean that they struggle to access some websites as it might mean they get discouraged from using computer mouses and keyboards. To encourage this try to keep the website simple so people don't have to move the mouse as much keep the navigation simple and easy to navigate around.

As well as these disabilities there are other aspects that users may find when they're viewing a certain website. For example, your website is in English but the person viewing it cannot speak English instead the speak German. This can be resolved by having the website have multiple choices on languages which can include the other target audience outside of your geo-demographic. Also users may have issues with their internet connection. It all comes down to where the person is located within the world, as a person living quite far away from the hosted website it can cause slow loadings and if providing downloads then it may cause slow downloads.