Use of cookies
Cookies are pieces of information that a website can transfer to an individual’s computer hard drive for record keeping. Cookies can make websites easier to use by storing information about your preferences on a particular website. The information remains on your computer after the internet session finishes but you can delete them using some browsers, manually or using system utilities. Most internet browsers are pre-set to accept cookies.
If you prefer not to receive cookies, you can adjust your internet browser to refuse cookies or to warn you when cookies are being used (see below). This site will work more efficiently if receipt of cookies is enabled.
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.
How to turn cookies off
If you would like to turn off cookies, you can usually do this using your web browser. Click the Help menu in your browser to find out how, or follow one of the links below for information about the specific browser you are using. Remember that cookies can be essential to the functionality of some websites (e.g online shops and services which you log in to) so make sure you are aware how your favourite websites are using cookies before turning them off for these sites.
More information:
Cookies In Use on This Site
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
- Save you having to login every time you visit the site
- Remember your settings during and between visits
- 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
- Personalise our site to you to help you get what you need faster
- 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
We use cookies to make our website work including:
- Making our shopping basket and checkout work
- Determining if you are logged in or not
- Remembering your search settings
- Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions
- Showing you which pages you have recently visited
- Allowing you to add comments to our site
- Tailoring content to your needs
- Remembering your preferences such as colours, text size and layout
- Remembering if we have already asked you certain questions (e.g. you declined to use our app or take our survey)
- 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, may include functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site may include the following which use cookies however 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 Youtube, 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 chosen on these networks.
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 if , on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.
We may use Advertising Cookies
Cookies are widely used in online advertising. Neither us, advertisers or our advertising partners can gain personally identifiable information from these cookies. We only work with advertising partners who work to accepted privacy standards such as http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/iab-good-practice-principles
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 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.
We may use Banner Adverts
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 visits 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.
We may use Affiliate Cookies
We have a number of partners who promote our service on a success-only basis (i.e. instead of paying for advertising, we pay them commissions on sales). 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.