About the Guide

What the Guide covers

The Guide covers legitimate independent businesses that are based or headquartered in West Yorkshire: professional services, business services, trades and other established local firms. National chains, franchise offices, lead-generation sites and businesses with a virtual office and a headquarters elsewhere are excluded.

Coverage runs across the whole county from the start, and depth is being built in order: Halifax first, then Leeds, Skipton, Huddersfield, Bradford and the rest. Halifax is deepest because that is where our own working knowledge, relationships and evidence are strongest. The Guide is a West Yorkshire resource, not a Halifax site with a regional name, and the towns index reflects that.

Consumer categories — restaurants, shops, hospitality and general leisure — are not part of the first phase. They may be added later.

How listings work

There are two levels. A basic listing records who a business is, what it does and where it works. It deliberately carries limited detail and no enquiry form; its job is to establish the business as an entity and connect it to its town and sector.

A recommended or featured profile carries more: services, areas covered, contact details, the people behind the business, and eventually photography, case studies and interviews. Recommended and featured businesses are marked as such wherever they appear.

Businesses are researched and added by the Guide. There is no submission form yet. If you think a business belongs here, or you have spotted something wrong, write to[email protected].

Where the information comes from

Every record here is built from three sources and nothing else: Google’s public business data, the business’s own website, and, for part of our Huddersfield and Halifax coverage, the membership of SAM Networking. Each profile lists which of those it was checked against.

Where a business has a Google rating we publish the score, the number of reviews behind it, and the date we read it. We do not restate those ratings as our own structured data, because they belong to Google and to the people who wrote them.

Logos are the businesses’ own, taken from their websites and served from ours so their servers are not paying for our traffic. Any business that would rather we did not show its mark only has to say so.

How the Guide makes money

At the moment, it does not. There is no advertising, no paid placement and no sponsored content on the site today.

In time the Guide expects to earn from sponsorship, enhanced business profiles, clearly labelled sponsored features and, potentially, lead generation. When that starts, two things will stay true: a position in a ranking will remain editorial and unbuyable, and anything paid for will be labelled at the point it appears rather than in a disclosure page nobody reads.

How we rank sets out the selection process in full.

Who writes it

The Guide is written and researched in Halifax by people who work with West Yorkshire businesses every week, which is where the local knowledge comes from. Knowing which Calderdale contractors turn up, which accountants answer the phone in January and which agencies keep a client for a decade is not something you can research from outside.

That closeness cuts both ways, and we would rather say so. Our coverage is deepest where we know the ground best, and thinner in the parts of the county we know least.How we rank sets out where the method is weakest.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it and say that we have. Corrections are published rather than quietly edited. Write to[email protected] with the page and the problem.