Contributors
Guest post guidelines
We commission and accept a small number of outside essays each year. If you build, design, certify or maintain decks in Australia, the desk wants to hear from you — after you have read this page.
What a piece must do
A Custom Decking essay is at least a thousand words, written in Australian English, and useful enough that a reader could act on it. We do not publish listicles that could sit on any home improvement site, nor copy that exists to park a backlink. If you want a link in return for payment, say so in the pitch. Those links, if we take them, are published with rel="sponsored".
Subjects that travel
- A material or climate you know from jobs, not from a catalogue.
- A council, bushfire or waterproofing problem you have actually walked a certifier through.
- Maintenance that fails in a particular suburb or exposure, with the repair that held.
How to pitch
Send a 150-word outline, three sources you will cite, and a note on conflicts (employer, product line, paid placement) via the contact form, topic “Guest pitch”. Do not attach a finished 2,000-word draft unless we asked for it. We reply when the idea can sit in a hub without repeating an essay already on the shelf.
House rules
- Original work only. No scraped or previously published articles.
- Australian measurements, codes and place names. Metres, not feet.
- No invented case studies. If a job is composite, say so.
- Images must be Creative Commons, public domain, or yours, with a credit we can print.
- We edit. Headlines, standfirsts and the last paragraph often change.
Read editorial standards before you pitch, and the journal index so you are not offering a piece we have already run.