What we collect, and what we do with it

What this notice covers

This notice applies to this website and to the enquiry form on it. It describes the information you give us, the information the site records on its own, and what happens to both.

If we go on to work together, the information exchanged during that work is governed by the agreement covering it, not by this page. This notice is about the website.

Information you provide

The enquiry form is the only place on this site where you can send us anything. It asks for three things and offers a few more.

Name — required

So a reply can be addressed to a person rather than an inbox.

Email address — required

The address we reply to. It is the only way we can respond to you at all.

Message — required

What you want to tell us. Please send only what is relevant to the enquiry — there is no need to include anything sensitive, and we do not ask for any.

Company — optional

Useful context for a first reply. The form works perfectly well without it.

Phone number — optional

Only if you would rather we called. We do not need it to reply by email.

What the enquiry is about — optional

A choice from a short fixed list, so an enquiry reaches whoever is best placed to answer it.

Updates consent — optional, never ticked for you

A separate checkbox for occasional updates. It is not part of sending an enquiry and has no effect on whether or how we reply. See the section on marketing below.

Information recorded automatically

When you submit the form, the site records a small amount of technical information alongside your message. All of it exists to make the submission reliable and to keep the form from being abused.

Timestamps

When the enquiry arrived, and when each attempt to route it to us happened. These are what the retention period below is measured from.

A reference for the submission

An identifier generated by our server, so a single enquiry is never processed twice and can be traced through our own systems without using your details.

Which page you sent it from

The page path only. Anything after it — a query string or a link fragment — is discarded before storage, so nothing carried in a link is ever kept.

Campaign tags, if a link carried them

The five standard campaign parameters, if you arrived through a link that had them. They tell us which piece of our own work an enquiry came from.

A short-lived keyed digest of your network address

Used only to limit how many submissions can come from one place in a short window. The address itself is never stored, never sent anywhere and never written to a log — what is stored is a keyed value derived from it, in a counter that expires within minutes. That value is pseudonymous rather than anonymous: it is not your address, but it stays the same for the same address while the key does, so we describe it as what it is rather than calling it anonymous.

Whether the delivery succeeded

A record of each attempt to route your enquiry to us, so a failed one can be retried rather than lost.

What we do not collect

It is worth being specific about the things this site does not do, because most sites do them.

• No analytics. There is no analytics product on this site of any kind.
• No advertising or tracking pixels, and no third-party marketing scripts.
• No cookies. The site sets none, and stores nothing in your browser.
• No embedded third-party content — no chat widget, no scheduler, no social embed, no hosted video, no external fonts.
• No file uploads. The form does not accept them, and cannot receive one.
• No profile of you, no cross-site tracking, and no attempt to identify you before you write to us.

• More about cookies and browser storage

How we use it

We use what you send for a short, specific set of purposes, and nothing else.

• To read your enquiry and reply to it.
• To work out whether what you need is something we should be doing, and to discuss it with you.
• To keep a record of the enquiry and the conversation that followed it, so we can pick it up again when you come back to us.
• To keep the form working — retrying a submission that failed to reach us, and stopping automated and abusive submissions.
• To send occasional updates, and only if you ticked the separate box for them.

Replying to you is not marketing

Sending an enquiry does not sign you up to anything. Our reply to your enquiry is a response to something you asked for, and it happens whether or not you tick the updates box.

The updates checkbox is separate, optional, and never ticked for you. If you do tick it, we record the fact, the moment you did it, and the exact wording you agreed to — so what you consented to is a matter of record rather than a claim we make later. If you leave it alone, we record that you did not consent, and no wording is stored against your name.

You can ask us to stop sending updates at any time, and that is independent of everything else: withdrawing it does not affect your enquiry, our reply, or any work in progress.

Who else handles it

One organisation besides us handles enquiry data, and it is listed below in full.

We do not sell your information, we do not trade or share it for advertising, and we do not give it to anyone who has no part in answering your enquiry.

Cloudflare

Runs this website and stores enquiries submitted through the form. The site itself and the enquiry database both sit on Cloudflare, so it necessarily handles the request and the stored record.

How long we keep it

Enquiries sent through this website are generally kept for up to 12 months from the day you submit them, and are removed periodically after that period. The technical record of how an enquiry was delivered is removed with it.

The period runs from when the enquiry arrives, not from when we last spoke about it — so it does not restart because a conversation continued, and it does not pause because an enquiry is still being discussed.

Removal runs on a schedule rather than at the exact moment the period elapses, so a record may exist for a short while past it before the next run removes it. When it is removed it is deleted, not moved, archived or copied somewhere else.

This 12-month period covers what this website's enquiry system holds. If an enquiry becomes actual work, the records created in doing that work — an agreement, correspondence about the project, and anything we are required to keep for legal, tax or accounting reasons — are separate records with their own requirements, and they are not governed by this paragraph. We are not telling you every record we hold disappears after 12 months, because that would not be true.

Two things sit outside the period in the other direction, and both are shorter rather than longer. The counters that limit how often the form can be submitted expire within minutes of the window they count. Our hosting provider keeps its own operational logs under its own arrangements, which we do not control.

Keeping it safe

Your enquiry travels over an encrypted connection and is written to storage before we tell you it arrived, so a submission is never quietly lost.

The system is built to hold as little as possible. Your network address is never stored. Nothing you type is ever written into a log, an error message, or a web address — the page you land on after submitting carries a short status code and nothing else. The form deliberately accepts no attachments.

No system is beyond reach, so we do not claim yours is. What we can say is that the amount held is small, the time it is held for is bounded, and the number of places it exists is as few as the job allows.

Your choices

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it before the retention period ends, or ask us to stop sending updates.

Ask through the enquiry form and say what you would like us to do. We handle these by hand — there is no self-service portal, and building one would mean holding more about you, not less.

You are never required to give us anything. The form asks for three fields because we cannot reply without them; everything else is optional, and leaving it blank changes nothing about how we treat your enquiry.

• Get in touch about your data

Changes to this notice

If what the system does changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top changes too. The rule we work to is that this page describes what actually happens — so a change to the system is not finished until this page matches it again.