What are cookies and why are they used

Cookies are small text files that are stored on a visitor’s computer and enable information to be remembered by a website during a visitor’s current visit and in some cases are stored to be used on future visits to a particular website.

Depending on the web browsing program used cookies can be deleted or disabled but this may prevent you from using the website in the way you expected. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site.

How we use cookies

We do not use cookies to attempt to find out the identity of anyone visiting our website or to store any personal information about visitors. We only use cookies to help our site work as expected for visitors and to help us to maintain and develop our website by recording things such as the number of visitors via the use of a service called Google Analytics (more below).

Given that we only use cookies in this way and to avoid distraction for visitors we decided not to include a ‘pop-up’ or other notification that our website uses cookies.

Analytics

When someone visits our website we use third party services, Google Analytics and Heat Mapping Analytics, to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not make any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website.

More information about how Google uses Analytics data is available at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245

To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites visit http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

More information about Heat Mapping data is available at https://heatmap.com/privacy

How do I change my cookie settings?

Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, we would suggest the following reference sites:

The cookies used on our website are as follows. Note that depending on the pages you visit not all will be used.

COOKIES COMMENCING:PURPOSE
catAccCookiesCookie set by the UK cookie consent plugin to record that you accept the fact that the site uses cookies

_utma

_utmb

_utmz

These are used by Google Analytics to record anonymous visitor data.
_ga, _gidUsed by Google Analytics to distinguish unique users. Important: Google Analytics does not store any personal information about website users. Read the Google Analytics privacy document for more details.
_gatUsed by Google Analytics to “throttle request rate” – Find out more from Google
wfvt_Used by our website software to record information about your general geographic location (used to remember your time zone, for example). These are known as session cookies and are deleted when you leave the site.
wp or wp-Used by our website software to temporarily store settings in the page(s) you are visiting in order to display the correct content for that page
wfwaf-authcookieUsed by the website to authenticate user logon requests

 

If you have any other queries about our use of cookies then please feel free to contact us.