Cookie policy
Last updated: 12th May 2021
cookie and privacy policy purpose
The purpose of these policies is to define internal procedures related to data gathering and handling compliance with the GDPR principles.
What are cookies?
On my site, I use small text files (cookies) that help me to look more closely at the site traffic. Your browser (Google Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer, for example) stores them on your computer, tablet or mobile.
They give my website a sort of ‘memory’ to recognise you if you come back.
There are a few different types of cookies on my site that help with other things. Here’s a list of what they’re called and what they do:
Performance Cookies
The website user experience is improved by performance-enhancing services (things that help me improve the quality of our site). I use cookies from these services to make them work. These cookies tend to gather session data to create things like activity maps or anonymised recordings of visits so that we can fix any problems with the website and pages.
For example, I might use performance cookies to track how visitors interact with my site. From the data collected, I might see that people on mobile spend a lot less time on one of my pages because they confuse what they are supposed to do. Because I have that information, I can then improve that page and make it less complicated.
Analytics Cookies
These cookies collect information about your session on my site. It gathers information about your computers like the browser or operating system it uses or its IP address. This helps me to create meaningful reports about the overall traffic that we receive on the site. An example of this type of service would be Google Analytics.
Because of the anonymous data it gathers on my behalf. We can understand that the blogs I write are most popular in certain countries, where they are shared online, such as LinkedIn or Facebook. This helps me better understand people who visit the site to try to make it more interesting to them.
Functionality Cookies
These cookies run the more interactive parts of my website. For example, they might provide me with information about your visit to know which country you live in. That means depending on the volume of visits outside of Europe. I can make write some blogs that are culturally diverse and with more appropriate grammar and tonality. They might be persistent, which means they stay on your computer for a longer time. This allows the website to show content that you might be interested in based on previous visits or on things you’ve viewed before. They also enable the website to avoid asking for information about you that we’ve already asked for before.
Can Cookies be Blocked?
Yes, they can! And it’s straightforward to do just hit decline when the banner appears.
Instead of going into all the details on how to block cookies here, we’ve found a few helpful sets of instructions that you can use. We’ve sorted them by a browser for you:
We hope that this has answered some of your cookie-based questions. However, if you have more, here’s a more significant guide all about cookies.
List of the Third-Party Cookies My website currently Uses
Listed below are the third-party cookies my website uses. Of course, I am not responsible for the content or privacy policies of these Third Parties or other sites, so please check these yourself to make sure you’re happy.
The following Third-Party cookies are all used for analytical and targeting purposes:
Google Analytics
These cookies are used to collect information about how you use my website. This information is used to create reports and help me improve my site. The cookies collect data anonymously, including the number of visitors to the site and blog, where visitors have come from to land on the site, the pages they visited and whether they subscribed to, or ordered from, the site.
If you don’t want your data used by Google Analytics, you can install the Google Analytics ‘opt-out browser add-on. To opt out of Analytics for the web, visit the Google Analytics opt-out page and install the add-on for your browser. Learn more about opt-out and how to install the browser add-on here correctly.
Mailchimp
I use Mailchimp as an email platform to connect with subscribers occasionally. It stores personal data such as your email, name when/how you subscribed with us and your purchase activity on the site. You can unsubscribe from our marketing list at any time here.