Foundation

Foundation is the technical layer that allows a website to be discovered, indexed, understood and used reliably.

It includes the boring things that decide whether people and machines can work out what the site is, what each page is about, where the business operates and what should happen next.

Titles, headings, metadata, schema, URLs, navigation and internal links are not clarity by themselves. They are mechanisms for creating clarity.

Great content cannot help if important pages cannot be crawled. Reputation cannot compensate for broken indexing. A strong brand still loses opportunities when its website is slow, inaccessible or difficult to understand.

The same principle applies to modern rendering. The framework matters less than the output. Machines cannot recommend what they cannot reliably read.

I group Foundation into six systems. Together they describe whether the technical baseline is doing its job.

Foundation should be improved in dependency order. Fix what prevents access before optimising what happens after access.

1. 1

   Make the website reachable.

2. 2

   Make important content available without unnecessary rendering barriers.

3. 3

   Make the right pages indexable.

4. 4

   Make every page clear to people and machines.

5. 5

   Make the experience fast, accessible and secure.

6. 6

   Make the site easy to navigate and understand.

7. 7

   Measure what happens and keep improving.

A concise baseline for checking whether the fundamentals are in place.

The framework becomes useful when it survives contact with real businesses.

Primary documentation behind the technical recommendations in this framework.

Useful external tools for checking parts of the technical baseline.