💡 1185 things they never taught you in school
Building websites, learning to code, and launching online projects.
If your website’s contact form sends emails from Gmail or Yahoo instead of your own business domain, you’re quietly setting yourself up for serious email delivery problems — and once your domain gets flagged or blacklisted, your emails stop reaching anyone.
Millions of websites have cookie consent popups — and most of them are doing it wrong in a way that breaks the exact laws they were trying to follow. If you run a website, this could cost you more than you make in a year.
If your site earns money from ads or product sales, you can’t just pay your taxes once in April. The IRS expects payments throughout the year — and if you skip them, they’ll charge you a penalty even if you pay everything you owe later.
If you run any kind of public-facing website and it’s not accessible to people with disabilities, you could face a lawsuit under the ADA. Yes, even if your entire business lives online.
If you run a website with a subscription or free trial, you can’t just bury the renewal terms in fine print. The FTC has rules, and breaking them can cost you thousands of dollars per transaction — and some states have even stricter laws on top of that.
If you run a website and store subscriber emails through a service like Mailchimp — and that service gets hacked — you’re still legally on the hook to notify your users. Not Mailchimp. You.
If your site collects any data from kids under 13 without a parent’s permission, the FTC doesn’t care that it’s free or that you didn’t mean any harm. COPPA violations can cost you tens of thousands of dollars — per incident.
If your site collects data from anyone under 13, federal law requires you to get a parent’s permission first — and skipping that step can cost you thousands of dollars per violation.
If someone fills out a form on your website and that data gets exposed, you could be legally required to notify every single person affected. Here’s what that actually means for you.
You can register your website’s name as a business name and still lose it entirely if someone else trademarked it first. That’s not a technicality — it can mean a forced rebrand at your own cost.
If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, every name, email, and message someone submits through your contact form travels across the internet in plain text — completely readable by anyone who intercepts it.
If you build a website for someone, who actually owns the code? The answer might surprise you — and it could mean the difference between building a business and giving away your best work for free.
If you run a business online and your marketing emails have no physical address — or a fake one — you could be breaking federal law. Yes, even if you never leave your bedroom to do business.
If you build a website for a client and there’s no written agreement addressing copyright ownership, U.S. copyright law says YOU own that work — not them. Most people have no idea this is how it works.
You bought the URL. You built the site. But if you didn’t register the brand name as a trademark, someone else can legally use it — and you might have no legal leg to stand on.
You picked a cool name, built something, and now a corporation is suing you for it. This happens more than you’d think — and ‘I didn’t know’ is not a legal defense.
If you build someone a website with just a handshake deal, you could walk away with nothing — and they could walk away with everything you made. This is one of the most common ways young developers get burned.
You found a site you love and figured, hey, how would they even know? They’d know. And it could cost you.