Who we are
We design and build websites and applications from Denver, Colorado. This policy explains what happens to your personal information when you use our website.
We decide why information is collected here and what happens to it, which makes us the controller of it. If you want to talk to a person about any of this, you’ll reach the same person who’d do the work:
- International Tradex Corp. DBA Bertex Design
- Email: [email protected]
- Post: Denver, CO, 80202
2. What this policy covers
This policy covers bertexdesign.com and the enquiry forms on it.
It does not cover client project work. When we build or run a site for a client, any personal data on that site belongs to the client. They decide what’s collected and why; we act on their instructions under our contract with them. If you’re a visitor to a site we built and you want your data handled differently, contact the site’s owner, not us.
It also doesn’t cover other companies’ websites we link to. Their policies are their own.
3. What you send us
We have two forms. Neither one is a newsletter signup, and there are no accounts to create on this site.
| Form | Fields | Required |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery call enquiry | Name, email, phone, website, and whatever you write in the message box | None — send as much or as little as you like |
| Free site audit | Name, email, phone, website | Name, email and website |
Alongside whatever you type, each submission records your IP address, browser user agent, the page you submitted from, and the date and time. That’s there to help us trace spam and abuse, not to profile you.
Both forms are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that a human is submitting the form. To do that, Cloudflare receives your IP address and signals about your browser. It doesn’t ask you to solve puzzles and doesn’t track you across other websites.
Tell us only what you need to. If your enquiry involves something confidential, say so and leave the detail out of the form — we’ll find a better channel for it.
4. What’s collected automatically
Our website sits behind Cloudflare, which serves the site and filters malicious traffic. Every request generates a log entry containing your IP address, browser user agent, the page requested, and a timestamp. This happens for everyone, including people who decline all cookies — it’s how a website works, and we can’t switch it off without switching off the site.
We use those logs to keep the site up and to investigate attacks. We don’t use them to build a picture of you, and we don’t combine them with anything else.
Analytics is separate, only runs with your permission, and is covered in section 6.
5. Cookies and similar technologies
Nothing but strictly necessary cookies runs until you choose. Analytics, performance and marketing scripts stay switched off — not merely anonymised, but not loaded at all — until you accept the relevant category in the banner.
We group cookies into five categories:
| Category | What it does | Runs by default |
|---|---|---|
| Necessary | Security, load balancing, and remembering your cookie choices | Yes |
| Functional | Optional conveniences, such as remembering a display preference | No |
| Analytics | Counting visits and seeing which pages get read | No |
| Performance | Measuring load times and where the site is slow | No |
| Marketing | Measuring advertising, where we run any — see section 7 | No |
Where Google services are involved, we run Google Consent Mode with every storage type — analytics, advertising, ad personalisation and ad user data — set to denied before you answer the banner. Google’s tags receive that denial signal whether or not you interact with the banner at all.
We keep a record of what you chose and when, for twelve months, so we can show that consent was properly obtained. If we materially change what runs on the site, we raise the consent revision number and ask you again.
Changing your mind: open cookie preferences
at any time. You can also clear cookies in your browser, which resets your choices and brings the banner back.
6. Analytics
With your consent, we use Google Analytics 4, delivered through Cloudflare, to understand how people find and use the site: which pages get read, which don’t, roughly where visitors are in the world, and whether the site is working on their device.
Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser and receives your IP address, which Google uses to derive an approximate location and then discards rather than storing. We have not enabled Google Signals, advertising personalisation, or any cross-device tracking features on our property. We don’t use analytics to identify you individually, and we never connect analytics data to an enquiry you’ve sent us.
If you decline the Analytics category, Google Analytics does not load.
You can opt out of Google Analytics across every website using Google’s browser add-on.
7. Advertising
We don’t run advertising on this website, and you will never see a third-party ad here.
We may advertise elsewhere. Where we do — most likely on LinkedIn — we would place a measurement tag on our site so we can tell which campaigns actually produce enquiries, and so that people who have visited our site can be shown our ads again on that platform. Under Colorado and California law, letting an advertising platform receive information about your visit for those purposes counts as sharing personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, sometimes called targeted advertising.
We do not sell your personal information, and never have. No one pays us for it and we don’t pass it to data brokers.
Any advertising tag sits in the Marketing category, which is off unless you turn it on. Decline that category and nothing is shared for advertising. You can also opt out using the Global Privacy Control — see section 12.
If we do start advertising, this section, the cookie table in section 5 and the list in section 9 will be updated before the first campaign runs, and the consent revision will be raised so you’re asked again.
8. Why we use your information
- To answer you. Reading your enquiry, replying to it, and producing the site audit if you asked for one.
- To do the work. If we go on to work together, your contact details become part of that project record.
- To keep the site running and safe. Serving pages, blocking bots, stopping brute-force login attempts.
- To understand our traffic, with your consent, so we can write things people actually want to read.
- To measure advertising, with your consent, where we run any.
- To meet our legal and accounting obligations, and to establish or defend a legal claim if it ever comes to that.
We don’t make automated decisions about you that produce legal or similarly significant effects, and we don’t profile you.
9. Who else sees your information
We’re a small studio. Your enquiry is read by the people who’d do the work, and no one else inside the business. Outside it, we rely on these providers, all of which are bound by contract to use the data only to provide their service to us:
| Provider | What they do for us | What they receive |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Serves the site, filters attacks, runs the Turnstile spam check | IP address, browser user agent, requests |
| Vultr | Runs the server and stores the database | Everything stored on the site, including form entries |
| Twilio SendGrid | Delivers email sent by the site | Your name, email address and message content |
| Analytics, with your consent | IP address, pages viewed, device and browser | |
| Advertising measurement, with your consent, if and when we advertise | IP address, pages viewed, device and browser |
These providers are based in the United States and your information is processed there.
We’d also disclose information if the law required it — a court order, a lawful request from a regulator — or if the business were ever sold, in which case it would transfer to the buyer under this same policy. Beyond that, no one gets your information.
10. How long we keep it
| What | How long | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Form enquiries | 24 months | From your last contact with us, so we have context if you come back |
| Email delivery logs | 14 days | Long enough to diagnose a message that didn’t arrive |
| Cookie consent records | 12 months | Evidence that consent was properly obtained |
| Privacy request records | 24 months | Proof we handled your request correctly |
| Server and security logs | Up to 12 months | Held by Cloudflare and our host on their schedules |
| Analytics data | 14 months | Google’s shortest available retention setting |
| Client project records | 7 years | Contract, tax and accounting obligations |
You can ask us to delete your enquiry earlier than any of this, and we will — see section 12.
11. Your rights
Colorado and California give residents specific rights over their personal information. Thresholds in those laws mean a business our size may not be strictly required to honour all of them.
We extend them to everyone anyway, wherever you live and whether or not the law compels us. It costs us very little and it’s the way we’d want to be treated.
You can ask us to:
- Tell you what we hold — confirmation that we have information about you, and a copy of it.
- Correct it if it’s wrong or out of date.
- Delete it. We’ll do this unless we’re legally required to keep something, in which case we’ll tell you exactly what and why.
- Hand it over in a portable, machine-readable format.
- Stop sharing it for advertising, or stop profiling. Declining the Marketing cookie category already does this, but you can ask us directly as well.
Using any of these rights costs you nothing and changes nothing about how we treat you. We won’t give you a worse service, a worse price, or a slower reply because you asked.
12. Making a request
Email: [email protected] and say what you want. There’s no form to fill in and you don’t need to use legal language — “delete everything you have on me” is a perfectly good request.
We’ll ask you to confirm you’re the person whose data it is, usually by replying from the email address you originally contacted us from. We won’t ask you for extra identification we don’t already hold. If you’re an authorised agent acting for someone else, send us written proof of that authority.
We’ll respond within 45 days. If a request is genuinely complicated we can take another 45, but we’ll tell you before the first 45 are up, and explain why.
If you disagree with our decision
Reply to us and say so. We’ll reconsider and give you a written answer within 45 days, explaining our reasoning. This appeal goes to a person, not a process.
If you’re still unhappy, you can complain to the Colorado Attorney General at coag.gov/file-complaint. California residents can contact the California Privacy Protection Agency or the California Attorney General. We’d rather you came back to us first, but it’s your call.
Global Privacy Control
If your browser or extension sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as a valid opt-out of sharing for advertising and apply it automatically. You don’t need to click anything or email us — it just works.
13. Security
Everything on this site is served over an encrypted connection. Cloudflare sits in front of it, filtering malicious traffic. Administrator logins are restricted, rate-limited, and failed attempts are logged with the originating IP address so we can spot an attack in progress. The site is backed up regularly and the backups are encrypted.
We keep the number of people with access to enquiry data as small as the work allows, and we don’t copy it into other tools unless the project needs it.
No system is perfectly secure, and we’d be lying if we said otherwise. If a breach ever affected your information, we’d notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires — promptly and in plain language, not buried in a status page.
14. Children
This site sells professional services to businesses. It isn’t directed at children, and we don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, email us and we’ll delete it.
15. Changes to this policy
When we change this policy we update the “last updated” date at the top. If a change materially affects what we collect or who we share it with — adding an advertising platform, for instance — we’ll raise the consent revision number, which brings the cookie banner back so you can make your choice again with the new facts in front of you.
We don’t make changes quietly and backdate them.