Hello all i am in the process of setting up a blog about arts and crafts that i make just showing off the process, the finished product and showing what tools and techniques i have used. I have came across a few articles online explaining the need for legal pages i know that i will need a disclaimer if i am to run ads or affiliate links on the site (which i will be in the future) how ever i don't really understand what other legal pages a blog such as this might need, there will be links to an ebay or etsy store where i will be selling off some crafts. will i need a privacy policy, a cookie policy etc any help will be much appreciated.
That sounds like a potentially interesting blog. Of course, much will depend on the type of crafts and your skill at them. You need a privacy statement that outlines what your privacy policies, including cookies, blogs, etc., are. So, you first need to decide what your privacy policies are. The good news is that just about every website has a privacy policy that you can read and learn what is needed, etc. There may even be free privacy policy samples that you can use for on your site. You also need to think about legal notices such as copyright, trademark, and any other statements that your selling partners may require.
If you intend to gather and track data of visitors to your blog, you have to create your cookies policy, and not only that, you have to ensure that your cookie policy/privacy policy is GDPR and CCPA compliant for your blog/website.
If you are going to sell on ebay, why bother with creating a blog. Unless you plan to sell them off the blog. If you mean affiliate where you sell others ebay items, your blog must be litespeed and fast as ebay site.
The requirements for policies and disclaimer on blogs is a bit of a legal joke honestly, since the number of blogs who actually get sued for not having them is probably zero. But as they may be required by affiliate platforms or providers (and to be on the safe side), it's easy to get this setup. My advice is not to just copy paste some terms and policies from another blog, as these will often have mistakes or don't really match your situation, but to hire a lawyer. This ensures that you are covered in case anything goes wrong, which again, is highly unlikely Good news: you don't need an expensive lawyer. For a blog I recently created, I hired the cheapest lawyer I could find on Fiverr. This costed me $20 I think. The terms are probably not full proof, but it's 100x better than copy pasting yourself (since you are not a professional lawyer) and I can always say "a lawyer wrote these terms", which lowers my potential liability to almost zero. good luck!
If you are allowing comments on the blog, a process which asks for users email id, then you need a privacy policy. If you are using cookies, then you need a cookie policy as well. And a basic terms and conditions, telling who the blog is for, telling that children below certain age are not allowed to use the blog, which country your blog data is stored in (server location basically), how you share information with other websites or partners, what basic security methods are implemented, and who to contact in case some user feels violated in some way. If you are in USA, then you also need a accessibility compliant declaration, making sure that all parts of the website are accessible via screen readers. Although 99.9% people will probably never read those documents, but you need to tell those 0.1% who might read... Also, I have never heard that some blog owner landed in trouble because of not having those documents. Its the larger companies and websites which land in trouble and they are the ones who need these documents much more than blog owners need them.
In the EU you need to have a privacy policy. See my local law firm's one on their website - https://madden-finucane.com/privacy/