Cookies

Cookie Policy

Cookies in use on this website

Our website uses cookies to help provide you with the best experience we can. A cookie is a small file downloaded to your computer when you access websites. Typically, they contain site name and a unique user ID together with the duration of the cookie's abilities and effects, and a random number. Cookies cannot generally be used to reveal your identity or personally identifying information.

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you would expect
  • Save you having to login every time you visit the website
  • Remember your settings during and between visits
  • Offer you free services/content updates
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient

We do not use cookies to:

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

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below:

Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on your browser are adjusted to accept cookies, we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean you accept this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site then 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 cookies

The law on cookies demands that you, as a website user, are given the opportunity to understand how cookies are used on websites and consent to cookies being stored on your computer or another internet accessible device.

What are cookies?

When you first visit a website that uses cookies, a small piece of code is downloaded onto your computer. The next time you visit that website, your computer checks to see if it has the cookie that is relevant and sends the information contained in that cookie back to the website. The website then notes that you have been there before, and in some cases, tailors what is displayed on your monitor or screen to take account of that fact. They might also record how long you spend on each page on a website, what links you click and even your preferences for page layouts and colour schemes.

Generally, the role of cookies is beneficial, making your interaction with frequently-visited websites smoother with no extra effort on your part. Without cookies, online shopping would be much slower and more difficult. Also, without cookies, some websites will become less interactive if the cookie option is turned off.

Website Function Cookies

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Determining if you are logged in or not
  • Remembering your search preferences
  • Showing you which pages you have recently visited
  • Allowing you to add comments to our site

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

Third party functions

Our website includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is social media links. Our site includes the following which uses cookies:

Disabling these cookies will likely affect the functions offered by these third parties

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 be) plus how long they spend on the site and what pages they view. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so-called analytic programs also tell us how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before.

Most common cookies

Session cookies

These cookies expire when you close your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google, Chrome and MS Edge). These cookies are used for various reasons, for example, remembering what you have put in your shopping basket as you browse a website. They can also be used for security purposes to access your Internet banking or email.

Persistent cookies

These cookies are still stored on your computer after you close your web browser and allows your preferences on websites you have visited to be remembered. These cookies are used for a number of purposes, for example, your language choice or your user name on a particular website.

First and Third Party cookies

This refers to which website places the cookie. First party cookies are cookies set by the website you are visiting. Third party cookies are set by another website, which may have advertising on the page. Third party cookies on the main web browsers allow third-party cookies by default. You can change the settings on your browser to prevent this.

Exceptions

There are some exceptions to the above where it is essential for a website to store information on your computer, for example, to provide a service to you that you have specifically requested.

We may use:

Advertising Cookies

Cookies are widely used in online advertising. We, our advertisers and our advertising partners cannot gain personally identifiable information from these cookies. We only work with advertising partners who work to accepted privacy standards.

You can learn more about online advertising at http://www.youronlinechoices.com - You can opt-out of almost all advertising cookies at http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices, although we would recommend that you don’t because ultimately advertising helps keep much of the internet free. By opting out of accepting advertising cookies does not mean you won’t see adverts, it just means that they won’t be customised to you personally.

We may use:

Banner Adverts

From time to time we may use banner ads. These adverts are usually managed by a partner specialising in providing adverts for multiple sites. Invariably these partners place cookies to collect anonymous data about the websites you visit so they can personalise the adverts to you and ensure that you don’t see the same adverts too frequently.

Remarketing Cookies

Sometimes after visiting a website, you might see an increased number of adverts from the site you visited. The technology to do this is made possible by cookies, which are known as “re-marketing cookies”. We might use these type of adverts to offer special offers etc. or to encourage you to come back to our site. You can opt out of these cookies at any time as explained above.

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so, however, will very likely limit the functionality of our website and a large proportion of the world’s websites.

Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that your anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive.

Further information can be found at: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/