A new ruling by Europe’s highest court is likely to have significant implications for websites imposing service charges via tick-boxes that are ticked by default.

The European Court of Justice ruled that flight cancellation insurance as an optional supplement can only be offered on an opt-in basis following a case brought by a German consumer organisation against Ebookers.com, the online travel agency.

Retailers with large presences on the web will need to check their sites to ensure they keep to the rules, as this decision is likely to cause a precedent and will have consequences for how service charges are presented on websites.

Sitemorse clients need not be too concerned by the likely change in the rules, however, as a service built into the Sitemorse software around a year ago provides comprehensive reporting and will help users find all web forms that may be tucked away on their sites.

With normal websites today featuring hundreds or even thousands of pages, manual testing of pages is an expensive option in terms of man-hours, and typically it can take 4-6 minutes to check a single page.

Sitemorse CEO Lawrence Shaw said the latest ruling added to the growing need for web governance, supplemented if necessary by external support, particularly for companies with large or complicated website structures.

“Regulation around everything to do with websites is increasing, from accessibility laws to the recent EU regulations around privacy, and website managers face an uphill struggle to stay confident that their sites are compliant and as risk-free as possible.

“We are constantly monitoring new website regulation and in this case we have already added functionality that means web managers can find potential problem areas such as web forms easily. Automated checking is an invaluable aid that will help our users stay ‘web confident’ he added.

Notes to Editors – Sitemorse background

For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking.

Sitemorse is now the suite of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence.

Web content management systems alone cannot hope to cover major issues such as performance, compliance, brand, accessibility and quality without help. Our products integrate (including pre-live checking - within your CMS) to ensure these vital areas are constantly under control.

We offer three levels of products, from our enterprise platform 'Governisation', a blend of governance and optimisation, to a suite of tools to help web editors and managers, as well as free in-browser tools that can be used by any web user to quickly ensure pages are error-free (our web managers toolkit). All our services are SaaS based, with no set-up or management and are designed to ensure that our hundreds of clients in major corporations, the financial sector, and central and local government have total confidence in their websites.

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For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com

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