Privacy policy

Section 01

Who we are

This website is operated by Yireh Business Solutions, trading as Website Design JHB, a web design and SEO business working from Pretoria, Gauteng, and building for businesses across Johannesburg and the rest of South Africa since 2016.

For the purposes of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA), Yireh Business Solutions is the responsible party for the personal information described in this policy. That means we are the ones who decide what is collected and why, and we are the ones you hold to it.

Our Information Officer can be reached on the details in section nine.

Section 02

What we collect

What you type into the enquiry form. The form on our contact page asks for the following, and this is the whole list:

• Your name
• Your email address
• Your phone number
• Your business name
• Your current website address, if you have one
• Which services you are asking about
• How you heard about us
• Whatever you write in the project description
• Your consent tick, and when you gave it

The description box is the only open field on the form, so it is the one place where you might tell us something we did not ask for. Please do not put anything sensitive in it. If you need to send us something confidential, say so and we will arrange a better route than a web form.

What the website records by itself. Like every website, ours keeps ordinary technical records: your IP address, your browser and device type, the pages you opened, and the date and time. These are kept for security and for keeping the site working, not to build a profile of you.

What our analytics and advertising tools collect. Set out separately in section four, because it is the part most policies bury.

Section 03

Why we collect it, and on what basis

We use what you send us to answer your enquiry, prepare a quote, and do the work if you decide to go ahead. That is the whole purpose, and it is exactly what the consent tick on the form asks you to agree to.

POPIA requires a justification for processing personal information. Ours are these:

• Your consent. You tick the box on the form before it will send. You can withdraw that consent at any time, section eight sets out what that means and section nine is where you do it.
• Getting a contract ready, or performing one. Quoting for work you asked us to quote for, and then delivering it.
• Our legitimate interests. Keeping the website secure and understanding how it is used, in ways that do not override your rights.

We do not sell your personal information, we do not trade it, and we do not add you to a mailing list because you asked us for a quote.

Section 04

Cookies and tracking

A cookie is a small file a website leaves in your browser. Some are needed for the site to work at all. Others are there to measure or to advertise, and those are the ones worth being straight about.

• Necessary cookies. WordPress and the enquiry form set these to keep a session working and to stop the form being abused. The site cannot function without them.
• Google Analytics. Measures how many people visit, which pages they open and roughly where in the world they are. We use it to see which pages are worth improving, not to identify you.
• Google Ads tags. We advertise on Google. These tags tell us when an ad led to an enquiry, and they let us show our ads again to people who have already visited this site. That is what remarketing is, and it is why you may see us follow you around for a while.
• The Meta Pixel. The same idea on Facebook and Instagram: it reports whether an ad worked and lets us reach people who have been here before.

How to turn them off. Every browser will let you block or delete cookies in its settings, and blocking the non-necessary ones does not stop this site working. Beyond that, Google publishes an opt-out for Analytics and an ad settings page for advertising, both reachable from myadcenter.google.com, and Meta keeps its ad preferences in your account settings on Facebook or Instagram.

Turning these off changes what we can measure. It does not change how we treat an enquiry you send us.

Section 05

Who else sees it

A small number of service providers necessarily handle this data because they run the tools the site is built on. They act on our instructions and for no other purpose:

• Our hosting provider. The website and its database sit on managed WordPress hosting on South African servers, which is also the hosting we sell.
• Our email provider. An enquiry arrives as an email, so it lands in a mailbox like any other message.
• Google and Meta. For the analytics and advertising described in section four.

Information that leaves South Africa. Google and Meta are international companies and process data on infrastructure outside South Africa. POPIA allows that where the receiving party is bound by rules giving comparable protection, which is the basis on which those services operate. Everything you send through the enquiry form itself stays with us and with our South African hosting and email.

We will also disclose personal information where the law requires it of us. If that ever happens, and we are permitted to tell you, we will.

Section 06

How long we keep it

Enquiries are kept for 24 months from the last time we were in contact, and then deleted. Two years, because a quote that goes quiet often comes back, and a business that asked us in March may well decide the following February. After that it stops being necessary, so we do not keep it.

Where you become a client, we keep what the work and our tax and accounting obligations require, for as long as those obligations run. That is a separate thing from an enquiry and it is governed by law rather than by us.

Technical records and analytics are kept on the shorter cycles those tools use, and are not held indefinitely.

You do not have to wait out any of these periods. Ask us to delete something and we will, unless a law requires us to keep it, in which case we will tell you which one.

Section 07

How we protect it

The site runs over an encrypted connection, the hosting carries security monitoring and regular backups, and access to the mailbox an enquiry lands in is limited to the people who need it to answer you.

No one can honestly promise that a system cannot be breached. What we can say is what we would do: if personal information under our control were accessed by someone who should not have it, POPIA requires us to notify the Information Regulator and the people affected as soon as reasonably possible, and we would.

Section 08

Your rights

Under POPIA you have the following rights over the personal information we hold about you, and none of them cost anything to use:

• To be told what we hold and to be given a copy of it.
• To have it corrected where it is wrong, or completed where it is missing something.
• To have it deleted where we no longer have a reason to hold it.
• To object to how we are using it, on reasonable grounds.
• To withdraw your consent, at any time, without needing a reason.
• To complain, to us or to the Information Regulator. Section twelve.

Withdrawing consent does not undo anything we did lawfully before you withdrew it, and where we are answering an enquiry you sent us, withdrawing consent will usually mean we stop and delete the enquiry rather than carry on.

Section 09

How to ask us

Write to the Information Officer. Say what you want, in ordinary words, and we will act on it. There is no form to fill in and no template to follow.

We will confirm we have your request, and we may need to check that you are who you say you are before we hand over or delete anything. That is a protection for you, not an obstacle.

Section 10

Children

This is a website for businesses buying websites. It is not aimed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has sent us something, tell us and we will delete it.

Section 11

Changes to this policy

When what we do changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top of the page changes too. That date is the honest way to check whether you are reading the current version.

If a change materially affects how we use information you have already given us, we will not rely on a quiet edit to this page. We will tell you.

Section 12

Complaints

Come to us first. Most of what goes wrong is a misunderstanding and we would rather fix it than have you explain it to a regulator.

If that does not resolve it, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator of South Africa, which is the body that enforces POPIA. Its current contact details and complaint forms are published on its own website at inforegulator.org.za, and going to it directly is always open to you whether or not you have spoken to us first.