Privacy Policy

We respect your privacy

This privacy policy outlines the kinds of personal information Heartwood Web Design might at times gather through this web site, the circumstances in which we might gather it, and how we would use and protect it once gathered.

What information is collected, and how is it used and protected?

Sometimes, your name and email address

Your visits to our site are usually anonymous. In some circumstances, however, you might choose to give us personal information such as your name and email address; for example, to sign up for our newsletter or comment on our blog, or to contact us for a free quote or ask a question.

Such personal information is treated with the utmost care. When submitted though a form on our site, it is entered into a password-protected database on the server that hosts our site and a notification email with your details is sent to our office. Although no site owner can ever guarantee that their server will never get hacked, we take every reasonable measure to ensure database security.

Most importantly, your personal information is never shared with anyone else without your consent unless we are required to do so by law or deem it necessary for our own safety or the security of our business (in other words, unless you act in an unethical or criminal way — and since that’s not the kind of person you are, you have nothing to worry about).

Your IP address

The network address of the specific computer you’re using is called your IP address. Your IP number is collected when you submit a comment to one of our blog posts. This is only used to report spam. If your comment is legitimate, we will ignore the information.

Web pages visited

Non-identifying information about web pages visited is tracked by traffic analysis software such a Google Analytics or Awstats. This is to help us improve our web site by analyzing which pages are visited most frequently, which are visited for the longest amount of time, which ones are most often the last one visited before visitors leave our site, and that kind of information. As mentioned, this information is anonymous, not connected to any personal information of yours.

Cookies

A cookie is a small file of data that gets stored on your computer to help it interact with a given web site. Cookies are most commonly used to enable user sessions, whereby when you log in to an account you have on a given web site, you don’t have to keep logging in on every page you visit, but can just do it once and the web site will “remember” that you’re logged in. It does so with the help of a cookie. There are other uses for cookies as well, and some of them are a bit invasive of privacy, which is why some people choose not to allow cookies. However, this can limit your use of the full functionality of some sites that use cookies in perfectly non-invasive ways.

At Heartwood Web Design, we do not currently use cookies on our site. However, we’d like to let you know about the use of cookies by other companies as it relates to your visits to our own site:

Some of our links are to other sites that may use cookies

We may at times let you know about resources that we recommend, and link to the websites where you can sign up for them or purchase them. We provide this information as a service to you, and will never recommend a product or service that we do not believe is worth looking into. However, since we are referring you to such resources anyway, we might as well accept to receive commissions on any purchases you make from the suppliers as a result of our referral. It does not affect the cost to you, so using our links is an easy way for you to thank us for letting you know about the resource.

The relevance to privacy is that our links may need to contain referral data. When you visit the other site as a result of clicking on our link, the way that site makes sure we are properly credited for the referral is to place a cookie on your computer in case you do make a purchase at some point during the referral period. While this is not strictly our own doing, and relates instead to the other site’s privacy policy, we think we share in the responsibility to let you know about the cookie as well as the potential commission itself.

Google’s cookies

If you have ever visited Google or any website that displays Google ads, you likely already have a Google cookie on your computer. It does not track or store your name, address, email address, or telephone number, but may track your IP address so that it can display ads that are relevant to your geographical area. It also feeds Google some information about the topics of the pages you visit on any web site, including ours.

Please realize, this is not our doing, and we do not receive the information. It is, instead, a cookie placed by Google prior to your visit here, and they are the ones receiving the information.

You can opt out of the use of Google’s cookie by clicking the OPT-OUT button on their page on Advertising and Privacy: www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.

Your privacy is important to us

It’s not just a cliché, it really is the truth. As an ethical business, we feel particularly strongly about privacy, especially on the internet with all its “cloud” and networking aspects. So please let us know if there is ever anything about our privacy policy that concerns you.

Any future changes to this privacy policy will be posted to this page.