Why you can trust what you read here.
I started The Field Guide because owners around here kept asking me the same good questions and finding bad answers online: advice written to rank on Google instead of to actually help. So everything I publish has to pass what I think of as the neighbor test. If you stopped me at the grocery store and asked about it, would I stand behind every word? Here's what that means in practice.
It's really me writing to you.
No content mill, no ghostwriters. When I've done the thing myself, I'll tell you about it first-hand. When I learned it from research, I'll show you exactly where it came from.
I never ask you to just trust a number.
Every statistic links to the folks who actually measured it: Whitespark, BrightLocal, the FTC, Google's own documentation. If I can't back a figure up, I won't state it as a fact. Simple as that.
You'll know when it's just my two cents.
Sometimes the honest answer is "here's what I see working around Cleveland County." That kind of judgment is valuable, but it's not a study, so when it's my read, I'll say so plainly.
AI helps me draft. You still get me.
Like most publishers these days, I use AI tools to organize research and rough out drafts. But nothing reaches you until I've read every line, checked every claim, and rewritten anything that isn't how it really works out here. My name is on it, so I stand behind it.
If I get something wrong, I'll fix it.
Google changes the rules all the time, and I'm human. When something shifts, or you catch a mistake, the article gets corrected and noted. Email me if you spot one. I'd genuinely rather fix it than look right.
Here's the heart of it: people around here make real decisions with this information. Whether to redesign, what to pay, whether those ADA lawsuit emails are real. If you're going to act on my word, you deserve to know whose word it is, where the numbers came from, and who checked them. And if anything on this site ever misses that bar, tell me. My inbox is open, and I mean that.
Jarred O'BrienDesigner, developer & author · Studio O'Brien · Read the full bio