Editorial policy

Purpose of the guides

The guides exist to help people who look after websites make better structure decisions. They explain methods, cite the guidance behind them and point out limits. They are not advertisements, although the site also offers paid services.

Sources

• Official sources first. Where a standard or an official body has published guidance, we use it: Google Search Central for crawling, links, addresses, sitemaps and site moves; the W3C for accessibility; Australian government publications such as the Style Manual, the Digital Transformation Agency's standards, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and business.gov.au.
• Labelled secondary sources. Government guidance from outside Australia, industry commentary and research summaries are marked "secondary" in source lists.
• Labelled commercial sources. Pricing guides from agencies, salary data from recruiters and similar material are marked "commercial", because the publisher has an interest in the figures.
• Exact wording. When we quote a source, we copy its words exactly and put them in quotation marks. When we summarise, we do not use quotation marks.
• Check dates. Each source list shows the date the sources were last checked.

What we will not publish

• Statistics we cannot trace to a named source.
• Client results, testimonials or case studies. We do not publish client work.
• Rankings or traffic promises.
• Claims of certification or endorsement that we do not hold.

Worked examples are invented to illustrate a method. Each one is labelled as an illustration, and any numbers in it are marked as invented.

Writing standards

• Each guide opens with a direct answer, then explains.
• Plain Australian English, following the Australian Government Style Manual where it gives advice.
• Headings that make sense on their own, in a shallow hierarchy.
• Where a recommendation is our own judgement rather than a published rule, the text says so.

Tools

The planning tools run in your browser and send nothing to us. Each tool page explains what the tool does, what it cannot do and how to do the same work by hand. When we change how a tool works, we update its explanation at the same time.

Updates

Search engine documentation and accessibility guidance change. Guides are reviewed against their sources; the updated date shows the last revision.

Corrections

If you find an error, please tell us through the contact page. If a guide contains a factual error, we correct it and update the date. If the error changed the meaning of advice, we add a short note at the end of the guide describing the correction.

Platforms and payment

No software vendor, platform or agency pays for mention in the guides, and the guides contain no affiliate links. Our funding and commercial interest are described in the site footer.

Authorship

Guides are written and edited under the pen name Natalie Ross. The author page explains why.