House Style & Conventions

Owner: Bryan · Applies to: all published copy and every docs site we ship.

These are the rules that keep our work looking like one team made it. They are not suggestions.

Writing

No em dashes. Ever.

Em dashes (—) read as AI slop. Do not use them in any published copy, on any site.

• Rewrite the sentence instead: use a colon, semicolon, comma, parentheses, or start a new sentence.
• A plain hyphen is the acceptable fallback.
• En dashes in numeric ranges are fine: 10–15%, 1 May–2 Jul.

All six client sites, the public site, and the TLC report generator have been swept clean. Keep it that way: any new copy must comply.

Voice

• Client-facing copy is flowing prose, not dash-fragment bullet style. Write in sentences.
• Frame data as hypotheses to validate through CRO, not conclusions. "Paid social converts weakly, which suggests..." not "Paid social is bad."
• Call out caveats explicitly: sale weeks, traffic spikes, partial weeks, attribution gaps, small samples.

Numbers and data

• Always show the currency with the right symbol: A$ for AUD, US$ for USD.
• Always state the timezone for a reporting period (most clients are AEST; Sundae is explicitly Brisbane time).
• Compare like-for-like date ranges wherever possible.
• Known data quirks: drop null-title product rows; if the "Other" channel bucket shows an impossible CVR (attribution spread), blank the rate and add a caveat. See Gotchas.

Screenshots and images

• WebP, max 1600px wide, quality ~82.
• Keep the originals in team-data/; publish only the compressed copies under the relevant docs/.../assets/ folder.
• The .ab-compare / .ab-shot / .ab-mobile-shot CSS for side-by-side test shots exists in every client repo and the template.

Branding

• Each client site is themed to that client's brand, so reports feel native to them. Header color follows the logo; palette and fonts come from the client's own assets. Full heuristics: Reporting Hub Build → Branding.
• Active top tabs and active sidebar links use the client accent color. This was standardized across the template and all client sites. Preserve it when editing extra.css.

Editing map (where to change what)

To change	Edit
Styling / colors / fonts	docs/stylesheets/extra.css
Page content	docs/*.md
Header / footer HTML	overrides/
Nav, logo, site config	mkdocs.yml
Build output	Never. site/ is generated.

Naming

• Repo: client-<slug> (lowercase, no spaces). Pages project: client-<slug>. Subdomain: <slug>.dalayon.work.
• Build every site with mkdocs build --strict before committing. It must be clean (zero warnings).