PRIVACY POLICY

This Privacy Policy explains how PCW Designs (we, us, or our) collects, uses, and protects your personal data when you visit our website, contact us, or use our web design services. We are the data controller for your personal data, meaning we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use it. Our registered address is Studio 2, 1 Salters Road, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne NE3 1DH and our email for privacy matters is admin@pcwdesigns.co.uk

When you get in touch with us – whether by our contact form, email, or phone – we may collect your name, company name, email address, phone number, and any other details you choose to provide. If you become a client, we will also collect your billing address and payment information. Additionally, when you visit our website, we automatically collect your IP address and information about your browser and device using cookies (see below). We do not collect any sensitive personal data such as health or religious information.

We use your personal data for the following purposes: to respond to your enquiries, to provide you with a quote, to deliver our web design services under contract, to send invoices and collect payments, to communicate with you about your project, and occasionally to send you marketing updates if you have given us permission to do so. We rely on the legal basis of contractual necessity for most of our work with clients, and on legitimate interests for administrative purposes such as keeping our website secure. Where we send marketing communications, we rely on your consent, and you can withdraw that consent at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in any email or by contacting us directly.

We will never sell your personal data to anyone. However, we do share your data with a limited number of third parties who help us run our business. These include our hosting provider, our email and accounting software providers, and any third-party tools or plugins used in building your website. Where we share data, we ensure those third parties are contractually obliged to keep your data secure and to use it only for the purposes we specify. Some of these providers may store data outside the United Kingdom. When that happens, we ensure appropriate safeguards are in place, such as UK-approved standard contractual clauses.

We keep your personal data only for as long as necessary. For clients, we retain project and contact data for seven years after our final invoice, as required by UK tax law. For general enquiries, we keep your data for two years after our last contact, unless you ask us to delete it sooner. Marketing data is kept until you unsubscribe, plus a short period afterwards to ensure we remember your preference. Once the retention period ends, we securely delete or anonymise your data.

You have several rights under UK data protection law. You can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you. You can ask us to correct any inaccurate data, or to delete your data where there is no legal reason for us to keep it. You can also ask us to stop processing your data for marketing purposes, or to restrict how we use it while you raise a concern. To exercise any of these rights, simply email us at admin@pcwdesigns.co.uk. We will respond within 30 days. If you are unhappy with our response, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at www.ico.org.uk.

If we build or host a website for you that collects personal data from your own customers or visitors – for example through a contact form, a login system, or an online shop – then we act as a data processor on your behalf. This means that you are the data controller for your visitors’ data, and we will only process that data according to your instructions. We will sign a separate Data Processing Addendum with you before we handle any such data, as required by UK GDPR.

Our website uses cookies. These are small text files stored on your device. We use essential cookies to make the website work properly, and analytical cookies (such as Google Analytics) to understand how visitors use our site. Analytical cookies are turned off by default until you give consent via our cookie banner. You can also block all cookies through your browser settings, but some parts of our website may not function correctly.

We take data security seriously. We use SSL encryption on our website, enforce strong passwords and two-factor authentication on our internal systems, and keep regular encrypted backups. However, no data transmission over the internet is completely secure, so you share your data at your own risk. We will notify you and the ICO without undue delay if a personal data breach occurs that is likely to affect your rights and freedoms.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page, and where they are significant, we will notify you by email. This policy was last updated on [date].

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or wish to make a data subject request, please contact us at admin@pcwdesigns.co.uk or write to us at Studio 2, 1 Salters Road, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne NE3 1DH, FAO Data Protection.