From May 25th, new rules will come into play in the European Union, meaning website visitors must give “explicit consent” to websites if you plan to use cookies to track their behaviour in any way.

This means any business blogger or website that uses any content management software must come up with ways of allowing visitors to opt in to your cookies.  Hopefully for most people, the software providers such as vBulletin or WordPress will come up with the technical solutions, but others will have to develop their own solutions unless they want to fall foul of European laws.

For WordPress, stuff like user logins or information (if someone leaves a comment without logging in, a cookie is placed to store their contact details) will be affected, although people running ecommerce websites won’t find that shopping carts are impacted as these are excluded from the law.  This will still go some way to slow down the user experience for a lot of business bloggers – and possibly have a negative impact on sales, visitor retention, visitor interactions (comments, etc) and social media bookmarking, as all these areas will now require users to initially “opt in” and allow cookies to be stored on their machines.

Experienced users will most likely just get on with it and ignore the issue (like the browser choice thing!), but less experienced users may think twice about leaving blog comments, etc if they don’t know your site.

A perfect example of how trust and quality is much more important these days and can be a game winning factor for many businesses.