How has the GDPR affected the web design world?

A month and a half into the GDPR sees some businesses still struggle with their grasp on exactly what they have to do to be compliant. A month ago, those four letters were on everyone’s lips; it wasn’t just marketers and communications teams scrambling to get to grips with the legislature that comes with such cataclysmic shifts in data laws. The unpreparedness of companies big and small leading up to and beyond May 25th 2018 was apparent. Just a few weeks on and the panic seems to have ebbed slightly, but the short term effects of the GDPR are beginning to surface.

Cookies The fallout from the GDPR means that users are getting sick of cookies, and sadly not the good kind. The notification which pops up as soon as you arrive on a website, asking if you consent to the site collecting cookies is invasive to say the least. Opt-in consent, which has been one of the biggest changes introduced by the GDPR, means that a web user cannot ignore these pop-ups; they have to give their consent or they aren’t allowed to use the website to its full potential.This means that your cookie policy is going to take up an awful lot of your site visitor’s screens, and your site’s usability will be effected by this. This is especially true if your audience is using mobile – as the cookie policy will often completely eclipse your site. Security Google Chrome has started to notify web users when a site is marked ‘unsecure’. You can tell the security of a site if it has an ‘s’ on the end of the ‘http’ at the beginning of its URL. This will mean that users will become more and more wary of unsecure sites, ensuring that it’s vital to secure an SSL certificate. Contact forms Contact forms are another area affected by the GDPR. As consent must be freely given and its use be completely unambiguous, if you’re one of the millions of websites which use contact forms as a way for visitors to get in touch with you, you have to state exactly what you’re going to do with the information you gather and how you store it. You also need to disclose who at your company will be able to see it and how long you’ll be keeping it for. On that last point, don’t forget that consent once gathered does not last forever.