How we write our guides

Every guide on this site is written by the Utility Mule editorial team, the same people who build and maintain the tools. This page explains how the guides are put together and what we do to keep them accurate.

Where topics come from

A guide starts from a problem as people describe it before they know what’s wrong: a photo that uploads sideways, a CSV full of strange characters, a PDF that won’t get smaller. We write about problems a tool on this site can actually solve, so every guide ends with a tool built and tested for that job. If there’s no reliable fix we can offer, we don’t write a guide that pretends otherwise.

How a guide is built

• The cause comes first. Knowing why a file behaves the way it does helps you choose the right fix and spot the same problem elsewhere. A sideways photo is an orientation tag issue, not a broken file.
• Trade-offs are stated. If a fix costs quality, removes something or won’t be accepted everywhere, the guide says so, including when the honest answer is not to convert at all.
• Follow-up questions are answered on the page. Each guide ends with at least three common questions, and the same questions appear in the page’s structured data, never questions that aren’t visible.
• Terms are defined. Technical words link to plain-language definitions in the file format glossary.

What we check

The tools a guide points to are covered by the output checks described in how we test our tools, which inspect the files the tools actually produce. The guides themselves go through automated checks for:

• Originality across guides. Guides are compared with each other so they don’t drift into one template with the nouns swapped. Guides that overlap too much are flagged for rewriting.
• Links between guides. Every guide must be linked from other guides, so none is reachable only from the index.
• Structured data. Article, breadcrumb and FAQ markup is checked on every guide, and the FAQ markup is generated from the same questions shown on the page.

Automated checks catch structural problems. They don’t prove that every sentence is right, which is why corrections matter.

Dates

Each guide shows the date it was last updated. We change that date when the content changes in a way a reader would care about, such as a new step or a corrected fact, not for spelling fixes or layout changes.

Advertising

The site is funded by advertising. Advertisers have no say in what guides cover or recommend, and guides don’t recommend products in exchange for payment.

Corrections

If something in a guide is wrong, out of date or unclear, tell us through the contact page with the guide’s address and what you found. We correct factual errors and update the guide’s date when we do.