Government of Canada
Federal business information, taxes, permits and programs.
Website Planning Resources and Useful Reference Points
A strong website project touches more than design. Hosting, domain management, analytics, accessibility, search documentation, performance testing and content planning all affect the result. This page collects practical reference points and explains when they matter.
Canadian Anti-Spam Law
Official information about commercial electronic messages and consent requirements.
Google Search Central
Primary documentation for crawling, indexing, structured data and search best practices.
Practical reference points
Tools are most useful when you know what question they answer
Performance scores, accessibility scans and search reports can reveal real problems, but no single number tells you whether a website is good. A page can load quickly and still fail to explain the service. It can have perfect metadata and still provide thin content. It can be visually attractive while forms are unusable on a phone.
We use technical tools as part of a broader review. PageSpeed Insights can identify image and rendering issues. Search Console can show indexing and query data. Analytics can reveal user behaviour. Browser developer tools help debug layout and network problems. Accessibility testing can catch contrast, landmark and labeling issues that visual review misses.
Useful categories of website tools
- Performance: loading, image sizing, caching and rendering diagnostics.
- Search: indexing, query visibility, crawl issues and structured-data validation.
- Accessibility: automated checks plus keyboard and screen-reader review.
- Content: page inventories, broken-link scans and duplicate-title checks.
- Infrastructure: DNS, SSL, hosting configuration, redirects and response headers.
Server configuration matters too
The site should be configured for the environment where it actually runs. Apache commonly uses .htaccess; Microsoft IIS uses web.config. This build is prepared for IIS so redirects, caching, compression and custom errors can be managed in the correct configuration file.