Why We Build Your Privacy Policy and Terms Pages, But We Don't Write Them
Every custom website we build includes two pages most people never think about until they're staring at them in the site map. A Privacy Policy and a Terms & Conditions page.
We create the pages. We format them, style them, and make sure they live in the right place in your navigation. What we don't do is write the words that go on them. And that trips people up, so let me explain what these pages actually are and why the line matters.
What these two pages are for
A Privacy Policy tells visitors what personal information your website collects, how you store it, and who else touches it. If you have a contact form, a booking tool, email marketing, or Google Analytics running in the background, you're collecting data whether you think about it or not. The policy is where you tell people that in plain language.
Terms & Conditions is the other side. It sets the rules for working with you. Payment terms, refund and cancellation policies, what you're liable for, who owns the work, and what happens when something goes sideways. For a service business, your cancellation policy usually lives here.
Two different jobs. One protects your visitor. One protects you.
Why we build them but won't write them
This is the part that surprises people, so bear with me.
The copy on these pages is legal content. Your cancellation window, your refund terms, your liability language, the compliance rules that apply if you serve clients in California, the EU, or here in Canada. That's not brand copy, and it's not design. It's law, and it changes based on your industry, your location, and the tools you use.
We're a brand and design studio. A good one. But we are not lawyers, and writing your legal terms would mean giving you legal advice we're not qualified to give. If we drafted your refund policy and a client later disputed it, you'd be standing on language a designer wrote. That helps no one, least of all you.
So we hold the boundary on purpose. We build the container. You provide the copy. That way the words carrying real legal weight came from someone qualified to stand behind them.
Where the copy actually comes from
You have a few options, and they're not equal.
The gold standard is a lawyer who works with businesses in your industry and your region. Yes, it costs more upfront. It also means the language is built for you, not pulled off a shelf.
The middle option is a reputable template service like Termly or a policy generator built for your country. Fine as a starting point, but read every line before it goes live, because generic templates miss the specifics that matter.
The option most people reach for is AI, and it can genuinely move you forward if you use it as a first draft and not a final answer. The trick is giving it enough context to produce something worth taking to a lawyer, instead of something vague you have to redo. So we built you a prompt that does exactly that.
The prompt
Copy this into ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever AI tool you use. Fill in every bracket. Whatever it produces is a starting point you take to an attorney, not a finished document you publish.
Notice the last line of each document the prompt generates. It reminds you to have a qualified attorney review everything before it goes live. That's not us covering ourselves. That's the single most important step in this whole process.
Once you've got your approved copy, send it over and we'll place it on your site, styled to match everything else. That's the part we're good at, and the part we'll gladly take off your plate.
Questions about where these pages sit on your site or how they connect to your forms, ask away. Questions about what your refund policy should say, that one's for your lawyer, and we mean that as a favour to you.
