How to comply with the Companies Act of 2007

At the start of 2007, the Companies Act of 2007 came into force – affecting everyone running limited company or limited liability partnership business.

Although the act is ridiculously long – there are two important aspects of the Act that should be highlighted to readers of this blog, affecting any of the afore mentioned type of businesses that runs e-mail or a web-site (so that really should mean 99% of businesses!).

Mandatory Literature requirements

The first is that it is now mandatory to have your companies registered office address, registration number and names of directors displayed on all of your literature – including your web-site and e-mails. So make sure to update your e-mail signatures and your web-site contact page with these details (the details only need to be displayed once on any web-site).

Web-Site Accessibility

The second aspect is that you must make your web-site accessible to all, including anyone who is deaf, partially-sighted or blind. The W3C (a web governing body) has a list of recommendations, broken down into Priorities (Priority 1 – your web-site must satisfy the check, Priority 2 – your web-site should satisfy the check, Priority 3 – your web-site should attempt to satisfy this check for the benefit of it’s readers) that you need to consider with your web-site.

Having recently re-jigged my own business web-site – I followed the W3C Recommendations through. I’m no superstar Web Developer, but achieving the Priority 1, and most of the Priority 2 recommendations is not at all difficult (in fact, a package like Microsoft Expression almost forces you to tick all these boxes before publishing your site). At worst, it usually involves a bit of tweaking of the HTML code of your web-site.

For those with larger or more complicated sites, it’s definitely worth going back to your Web Developer to ask them to provide you with assurances of conformity to these new standards. Failure could theoritically lead to someone with a disability suing you for making your web-site unreadable to them.