Cookie Policy

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
  • Offer you free services/content (thanks to advertising)
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook and Twitter
  • 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)
  • Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties

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

Website Function Cookies

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

Cookie NameCookie CategoryDescriptionDuration
wordpress_2WordPress cookie for a logged in user.session
wordpress_logged_in_2WordPress cookie for a logged in usersession
wordpress_test_2WordPress cookie for a logged in usersession
wordpress_test_cookie2WordPress test cookiesession
wp-settings-1Wordpress also sets a few wp-settings-[UID] cookies. The number on the end is your individual user ID from the users database table. This is used to customize your view of admin interface, and possibly also the main site interface. 1 year
wp-settings-time-2Wordpress also sets a few wp-settings-{time}-[UID] cookies. The number on the end is your individual user ID from the users database table. This is used to customize your view of admin interface, and possibly also the main site interface. 1 year
PHPSESSID1To identify your unique session on the websitesession
SESS1To ensure that you are recognised when you move from page to page within the site and that any information you have entered is remembered.session

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

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 helps us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of on marketing.

We use Google Analytics to provide this service which sets the following cookies:

  • _utma
  • _utmb
  • _utmc
  • _utmz

You can read about how these cookies are used here.

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.

Cookies are set by these networks and each has their own Privacy and Cookie Policy which you should be aware of. The privacy implications of this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

YouTube Cookies

Some clips on this site may be provided from YouTube. YouTube also uses cookies to collect information. Cookies can be used to store data about the user’s computer or the user watching a video. YouTube uses cookies to help maintain the integrity of video statistics, prevent fraud and to improve the site experience, among other things. YouTube uses cookies on both youtube.com and on videos embedded from youtube.com. YouTube is part of Google and you can read about its privacy policy here.

Advertising Cookies

We fund our site by showing adverts as you browse our site. Cookies are widely used in online advertising. Neither us, advertisers or our advertising partners can gain personally identifiable information from these cookies. Some adverts are managed by a partner specializing in providing adverts for multiple sites. Invariably these partners place cookies to collect anonymous data about the websites you visit so they can personalize the adverts to you, ensure that you don’t see the same adverts too frequently and ultimately report to advertisers on which adverts are working. You can opt-out of almost all advertising cookies at this site although we would prefer that you didn’t as ultimately adverts help keep much of the Internet free. It is also worth noting that opting out of advertising cookies will not mean you won’t see adverts, just simply that they won’t be tailored to you any longer.

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. (See below for specific instructions for the most popular browsers). Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our website (and a large proportion of the world’s websites) as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.

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.

Browser Specific Instructions to Block and Remove Cookies

Much of the cookie information text on this site was derived from content provided by Attacat Internet Marketing http://www.attacat.co.uk/, a marketing agency based in Edinburgh. If you need similar information for your own website you can use their free cookie audit tool.