Under GDPR rules, after May 25th, your school website will have to have a notice to say that it uses cookies. If you don’t know what cookies are, in summary, they are something that keeps a little bit of a user’s data on your website. Because it isn’t your data, under GDPR law, you will have to let the user know that you are using them. Because your website is very very likely to store these cookies even without your knowledge, you’ll need to add the notice to your website. Here is a full explanation of cookies on a website dedicated to them!
It is likely that your school website is in one of the following situations:
- It was made by an external company and maintained by them
- It is a Scoilnet Blog
- It is hosted on a site like Wix or Weebly
- It was made years ago on something like WebsiteX5 or Dreamweaver
- It is hosted on your own WordPress site
- It is hosted on your own site using some other tool
I will go through what you need to do for all but the last option.
It was made by an external company and maintained by them
You need to get in contact with the company and ask them to add a notice that your school site is storing cookies and that there is an Agree button on this notice.
It is a Scoilnet Blog
I have asked the PDSTTiE to add a plugin to automatically add this to your Scoilnet blog. As of this time of writing this hasn’t happened yet. You need to get in contact with the PDSTTiE and ask them to get this plugin as soon as possible.
It is hosted on a site like Wix or Weebly
Here is what Wix is doing: https://support.wix.com/en/article/site-compliance-with-the-european-union-cookie-law
Here is what Weebly is doing: https://www.weebly.com/inspiration/gdpr-and-small-business
It was made years ago on something like WebsiteX5 or Dreamweaver
You’ll have to add some code to your website. There is a good script generator here: https://cookieconsent.insites.com/
Insert the script you have made into the index.html page of the website and upload the file via FTP.
It is hosted on your own WordPress site
You can use the solution above or you can download any Cookie plugin. This is the plugin I am using. https://wordpress.org/plugins/gdpr/
Last Update: April 28, 2018