Legal and ethical issues: web design

In this section I will be talking about the legal and ethical issues of a website. The first thing I will discuss is what needs to be taken in to consideration when creating a website are things like copyright copyright contains things such Images, images you use you must own the rights to the images the reason why you must own the rights to the images are so you do not break copyright laws. To avoid this you should make sure you have indemnify on the image such as a watermark (a symbol that shows who owns the rights to the image.) which means you have proof that it is your image to use, for example most websites have a watermark style copyright at the bottom of their page to show that it is following the law.

Text can also be copyrighted for example on my record company website lyrics to a song could be copyright protected so someone else cant pass a bands song off as one of their own songs, the band and record company that produced the song would have to get exclusive rights to the song.

 If you have edited the image for example you should make sure it doesn't misrepresent someone or something that could offend for example; to change the colour of someone's skin could offend a race of people this is an ethical issue, doing something like this could give your website a bad name, you must also not discriminate against religion, gender or sexuality, for example with my website Shockrock records the music could contain violent themes, bad language e.g. swearing or be seen as something that could offend a religious member of the target audience in order to combat this, I will make sure there is a warning sign on my website to signify offensive material.

Another thing that needs to be taken in to consideration are disabled or the handy capable these may include the visually disabled, to combat this I could get a screen reader which is a program that reads the website to the visually disabled user  meaning that they can access the site too and not miss out on the music or bands that they like, another disability may be the hearing impaired this could be to combat on a music label website however we could include some kind of sign language so that they can learn the lyrics to a song or see what someone is saying in an interview. The physical disabled may not be able to use their hands to scroll down the page which isn't fair to combat this we could add an animated section that plays things as soon as the page is entered. The reason disabilities must be taken in to consideration is so not to discriminate against everyone a website should be for all the target audience and connect them to a world they love.