What are cookies?

A cookie is a very small text file that is stored on your computer when you visit most websites. We use cookies to help identify your computer so we can provide a consistent user experience. Other sites might use cookies to track your payment and remember where you are in the order process for example.

Cookies allow web applications to respond to you as an individual. The web application can tailor its operations to your needs, likes and dislikes by gathering and remembering information about your preferences.
Overall, cookies help us provide you with a better website, by enabling us to monitor which pages you find useful and which you do not. A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any information about you, other than the data you choose to share with us. Please read our Privacy Policy for more information about the data we collect and how we store and use that data.

Cookies in use on this site

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Cookies and how they benefit you

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can.
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you’d expect
  • Remember your settings during and between visits
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
  • Pass data to advertising networks
  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
  • Pay sales commissions

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below

Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

More about our cookies

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work. These include:

  • Remembering any preferences you may have set as part of your browsing session
  • Allowing you to add comments to our site
  • Providing essential functionality to ensure optimum performance and security
  • Determining whether your browser allows cookies to be set

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video or map from Google Maps. Disabling cookies set by these providers will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.

Social website cookies

So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.

The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have selected on the network in question.

Anonymous visitor statistics cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us on an anonymous basis how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before. This information helps us to spend less money on marketing so that we can invest more into developing our services for you.

Turning cookies off

As a rule, cookies will make your browsing experience better. This is why most web browsers automatically accept cookies by default.
You can change your browser settings to refuse to set cookies if you prefer, and you can also delete any cookies already stored on your computer. However, disabling cookies may stop our website (and many others) from functioning properly.

To find out more about disabling cookies, use the Help menu in your web browser or take a look at the About Cookies website which offers further guidance.

It may be that you concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.