How I built two websites to learn marketing — Part 2: the legal part
In the first part I mentioned that both of my websites have legal pages, hidden from the top navigation and linked in the footer. Although it maybe does not sound like a complicated task at first glance, in reality it was the largest single part of the whole project, and it took a few weeks. I also had to build it twice, because the first version turned out to be something I could not keep.
Let me start with what these pages actually are, because this project definitely updated my understanding of them as well. If you operate a website from Germany, two documents are required by law. The first is called an Impressum, which is a site notice: a page that says who is behind the website, with a real name, postal address and a way to contact them. The idea is that a visitor should always be able to find out who they are dealing with. The second is a privacy policy — Datenschutzerklärung in German — which has to explain what data the website collects about visitors and what happens to it.
Neither of these is decorative. They are legally required, and in Germany there is a whole industry around sending warning letters to websites that get them wrong. So this was not a part I could skip or improvise. The privacy policy is the harder of the two, because it has to describe every single tool that touches visitor data. Not in general terms — each one by name, with what it does and on what legal basis. My websites are small, but by the time I had a newsletter, website analytics, a cookie consent banner, advertising pixels, embedded fonts and a hosting company, the list was long. Every tool I added to the site added another section to the document.
So I did what seemed sensible: I paid somebody to generate them. I used eRecht24 Premium, which is a well-known German service that produces these documents through a questionnaire. It worked. The documents looked professional, they covered my tools, and I put them on both websites in German and English. I thought that part of the project was finished. But the problem — and I realized it only after the documents were already on my websites — is that their texts are licensed to you only while you keep paying. If you cancel the subscription, you have to remove the documents from your website. This is written on their own cancellation page, and the confirmation email I received later said the same thing: once the membership ends, the legal texts created with eRecht24 must be removed from the websites immediately.
I want to be fair here: this is not hidden, and it is not a scam. It is a normal licensing model, and if you are a business making money from your website, paying a monthly fee for maintained, updated legal texts is probably a reasonable deal. My situation was just different. This project has no income, the subscription was around €35 per month, and I could not commit to paying that indefinitely to keep two small websites legal.
So the documents had to be built again, from zero, on something I would actually own the right to use. I looked at several alternatives, of course. There is a well-known paid generator from a German lawyer, Dr. Schwenke, and a free one from activeMind, a data protection company in Munich. I then found a free generator from a law firm called Weiß & Partner, at ratgeberrecht.eu. That last one was the answer. It is free, it grants permanent use including commercial use, on unlimited domains, and it produces the documents in German, English and French. The only condition is that a credit link back to them stays in the text. No subscription, nothing to cancel, and nothing that can be withdrawn from me later.
An important detail: the generator covers the standard tools, but it cannot know what is specifically on my site. In my case, I had to write eight extra sections myself, in both languages, after checking the information with LLMs. They were sections about the hosting company, different Meta advertising features and a few others. The marketing site has almost the same set, minus the sections about social media, because it has no social profiles at all.
I wrote those sections myself rather than copying them from other websites. Overall, the generator gives you a very good base, but the base still has to be corrected and completed by you. For example, I filled in the personal contact details for each site. There is also a section about the right to object, which is one of the rights the law gives visitors, and the law says it has to be presented in a clearly distinguishable way. The generator had it as a bold line inside a list, and I gave it its own heading instead. In addition, at the top of each German version I added a line saying that the English version is below and that the German one is the legally binding one.
A few smaller decisions came from the same stretch of work. The site notice is identical on both websites, which surprised me until I thought about it — it identifies the person operating the site, and that is the same person, so there is nothing to differentiate. I also styled both documents to match the site they sit on, with the same fonts and a comfortable reading width.
Two things I take from this. The first is practical: check the licence before you build on top of something. The second is that having to do it the slow way was not wasted. I now know what every section on those pages is doing and why it is there, which I would not know if I had simply kept paying somebody to produce them for me.
There will be also a Part 3, where I will tell you how I was making the websites measurable — analytics, consent, and one bug that cost me an entire evening before I understood what was actually happening.