Editorial Policy
Last reviewed: August 2026. Reviewed at least annually and whenever process or authorship changes.
FreightTerms.co.uk exists to give importers, exporters, freight professionals and students a plain-English, up-to-date reference for UK freight, customs and logistics terminology. This page sets out how our content is written, who writes it, how we check it, and how we stay independent of the advertising that funds the site.
1. Editorial purpose
Our purpose is narrow and practical: help the reader understand a freight or customs term well enough to use it correctly in real work. Every page is written to answer three questions:
- What does this term actually mean?
- Where does it fit into a normal shipping or customs process?
- What are the common mistakes, and how do you avoid them?
We prefer worked examples, real port and airline routings, and quantified figures over abstract theory. We avoid marketing language, salesy fluff, and content padded to hit an arbitrary word count.
2. Authorship and credentials
Content on this site is written and edited by Paul Cowan, working under the imprint Wernddu Press.
- 32+ years in UK freight forwarding, from operations to management.
- Specialism in West Africa and South Africa trade lanes (Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, DRC, Angola, South Africa) — a body of work spanning bulk, break-bulk, containerised, project cargo and airfreight.
- Working knowledge of UK customs procedures (CDS, entry types, PVA, deferment, transit, warehousing) built through daily operational involvement.
- Founder of Freight House Logistics, a UK freight forwarding business.
Credentials matter for this site because Google, HMRC, and importantly the reader all care whether the person writing about customs has actually cleared a container. Every page reflects hands-on experience, not summarised web content.
Full biography: About FreightTerms.co.uk.
3. Content sourcing standards
Where a page cites facts, rules, deadlines, or figures that a reader might rely on, we source them from primary authorities wherever possible:
- UK customs, VAT, duty, procedures: HMRC guidance on GOV.UK, the Trade Tariff, and CDS technical documentation.
- Incoterms: the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Incoterms® 2020 rules. Where the 2010 rules still matter for existing contracts, we note that.
- Airfreight: IATA — TACT rules, Dangerous Goods Regulations, Live Animals Regulations.
- Sea freight: BIMCO, ICS, IMO conventions, standard bill of lading clauses, and Hague-Visby Rules.
- Trade documentation: UN/CEFACT and WCO reference materials, chamber-of-commerce certificate-of-origin guidance.
- Operational reality: current commercial practice at UK ports, common carrier clauses, and how forwarders and customs agents actually work day to day.
Secondary sources (industry press, trade association explainers, other reference sites) are used only for cross-checking, never as the sole basis for a claim. Where a term is contested or varies by carrier or jurisdiction, we say so on the page rather than pick one interpretation and pretend it's universal.
4. Fact-checking process
Before a page goes live:
- Every quantified claim (a duty rate, a deadline, a document validity period, a threshold) is checked against a current primary source at the point of writing.
- Worked examples use realistic figures — actual port pairs, plausible container weights, current-looking freight rates — not invented ones.
- Where a term has more than one common definition (e.g. "port of discharge" vs "place of delivery"), we lay out both rather than pick one.
- Calculator logic (CBM, chargeable weight, VAT) is manually spot-checked against known-good worked examples from IATA or HMRC before publication.
- Regulatory changes we're aware of but that haven't taken effect yet are flagged with an effective date rather than written as current fact.
5. Review schedule
Content on this site is reviewed on a regular cadence:
- Incoterms pages: reviewed annually, and immediately after any ICC update.
- Customs pages (CDS, VAT, PVA, duty deferment): reviewed every six months, and immediately after any HMRC change we become aware of.
- Airfreight pages (chargeable weight, IATA rules, DGR): reviewed annually.
- Sea freight pages (bill of lading types, demurrage, detention, port terminology): reviewed every 12–18 months.
- Trust pages (About, Privacy, Cookies, Terms, this Editorial Policy): reviewed at least annually or whenever material changes occur.
Where a page has been meaningfully updated, the "Last reviewed" date at the top of the page is refreshed. Cosmetic edits (fixing typos, improving a sentence) do not trigger a date change.
6. Corrections policy
We aim to get things right, but freight is a domain where a subtle mistake — the wrong CPT vs DAP call, the wrong entry type, the wrong deadline — can matter. If you spot an error:
- Email paul@wernddupress.com with the page URL and what you think is wrong.
- We aim to acknowledge within 3 working days and to make substantive corrections within 7 working days for factual errors, or immediately for anything urgent (a wrong deadline, a wrong duty rate, an incorrect procedural step).
- Significant corrections — those that change the meaning of a page — are noted with a brief correction note at the foot of the page and the "Last reviewed" date is updated.
- Typos and cosmetic fixes are made silently.
We don't hide from being wrong. If a page was inaccurate and someone acted on it, we'd rather that be discoverable in the page history than papered over.
7. Independence from advertisers
FreightTerms.co.uk carries advertising delivered by Google AdSense. Ads pay for the site's hosting, domain, and time to keep the content up to date. However:
- Advertisers have no editorial input. No advertiser sees, reviews, or edits content before publication.
- We do not accept payment to include, exclude, or slant coverage of any topic, product, carrier, port, or service.
- We do not accept payment for links in editorial content.
- We do not carry native advertising, "sponsored guides", paid-for reviews, or advertorial disguised as editorial. If content is ever sponsored, it will be visibly labelled and separated from editorial.
- Ad placement (banners, in-article slots) is separated visually from editorial content and follows Google AdSense policies on placement, labelling, and content compatibility.
8. Sister-business disclosure
The publisher of this site (Wernddu Press) is owned by the same person who founded Freight House Logistics, a UK freight forwarding business. Where a glossary page or article would naturally suggest that the reader might want operational help, we sometimes link to Freight House Logistics. These links:
- Are visually distinct from editorial content (a labelled callout box rather than an inline recommendation).
- Carry
rel="nofollow", in line with search engine guidelines on commercial links.
- Do not appear on About, Privacy, Contact, or legal-notice pages.
This relationship is disclosed here, on the About page, and in the site's terms of use, so a reader can weigh it for themselves.
9. Use of AI and automated tools
AI tools are used sparingly and only for support tasks: drafting first-cut structure of a page, checking for spelling and grammar, generating alt text for diagrams, and running consistency checks across pages. Every page is written, reviewed, and signed off by a human editor. No page on this site is published as raw AI output. Where a page uses an AI tool for research, the tool's suggestions are treated exactly like a secondary source — cross-checked against a primary authority before anything factual is stated.
10. Reader privacy
We do not use reader identity for editorial decisions. The site collects anonymised analytics via Google Analytics 4 (see our cookie policy) and we look at these to understand which topics readers need most and which pages are performing poorly enough to need rewriting. We don't segment individual readers or target editorial at named users.
11. Funding and revenue
The site's revenue comes from two sources: Google AdSense (display advertising) and, indirectly, lead generation for the sister business Freight House Logistics via clearly-labelled callouts on a small number of relevant pages. We do not take grants, sponsored content deals, PR-agency payments, or affiliate commissions for products we haven't personally used. If any of that changes, this policy will be updated to reflect it and the change will be flagged at the top of the site's homepage.
12. How to contact the editor
For corrections, feedback, permission requests, or editorial enquiries:
Paul Cowan — Editor and Publisher
Wernddu Press, Hereford, United Kingdom
Email: paul@wernddupress.com
Contact form: contact page
Short version: One editor with real freight experience writes every page, sources from HMRC / ICC / IATA / IMO, reviews content on a rolling schedule, corrects mistakes openly, keeps ads separate from editorial, and discloses the sister freight business up front.
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