Our Use of Cookies

This 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

Cookies are used to:

  • Make the website work as you’d expect
  • Save you having to login every time you visit the site
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
  • Continuously improve the website for you
  • Make marketing more efficient

We don’t 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

Granting 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 I take this, and your continued use of the website, to mean that you are okay with this.  Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from this site you can learn how to do this below, however, doing so will likely mean that the site will not work as you would expect.

More about cookies

Our own cookies

Cookies are used to make the website work including:

  • Making the checkout work
  • Determining if you are logged in or not
  • Allowing you to add comments to the site

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

Third party cookies

This site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video.

Disabling these cookies 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 there are sharing buttons on the site.

Cookies are set by:

The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

Site improvement cookies

New designs or site features are regularly tested on the site. This is done by showing slightly different versions of the website to different people and anonymously monitoring how site visitors respond to these different versions. Ultimately this helps the website to become better over time.

Visitor statistics cookies

Cookies are used to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited the website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when the 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 to continuously improve the website. These so-called “analytics” programs also show how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping more money to be put into developing services for you instead of marketing spend.

Advertising cookies

Cookies are widely used in online advertising. No personally identifiable information is collected by these cookies.

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 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.

You might see adverts as you browse the site. 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, ensure that you don’t see the same adverts too frequently and ultimately report to advertisers on which adverts are working. Our partners include:

Affiliate cookies

Partners may be used who promote our service on a commission basis. Cookies are required to allow us to reward these partners and these cookies are usually provided by specialist companies (known as affiliate networks). Neither us, the networks, or the partner advertising or recommending our services are able to identify you personally. We ask you to support us by allowing these cookies which ultimately help us to offer you the service we do at the price we do. Our affiliate cookies are provided by:

Turning cookies off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (Learn how here). Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites

It may be that your 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.