Terms & Conditions

These terms govern your use of Open Web Directory, a public directory of businesses with an editorial blog. By using the site, creating an account, submitting a listing or buying an upgrade, you agree to them. If you do not agree, please do not use the site.

1. Your account

You need a free account to submit a listing or request a featured post. You are responsible for keeping your login secure and for everything done through your account. Listings are tied to the account that submitted them, which is how you track and edit them. You must be 16 or over to hold an account.

2. Listings and review

• Every submission is reviewed by a curator before it is published. We may approve, decline, edit or remove any listing at our discretion — for example where the business cannot be verified, the content is misleading, unlawful or offensive, or the site it links to is unsuitable.
• You confirm that you are entitled to submit the business, and that the details you give are accurate and kept up to date. Do not submit confidential information: an approved listing is public.
• Approved listings are published on their own page with a followed link to the website you supplied. We aim to keep the directory permanent, but we do not guarantee that a listing, its position or its link will remain available for any particular period.
• You can update your listing at any time from your account, and ask us to remove it. We may keep a record of removed entries where we need to.
• Directory pages that link out to your website are published at our editorial discretion, and we may add or change attribution, categories or disclaimers.

3. Fast Track upgrade

Fast Track is a one-time fee that moves your listing to the front of the review queue. It buys priority handling only:

• It is not a guarantee of approval, of a particular position in the directory, or of search rankings.
• The price is shown before you pay, in the currency of our payment account, and is charged once. There is no subscription and nothing renews.
• If we decline the listing you Fast Tracked, tell us and we will refund the fee.
• If you have already paid and change your mind before the listing is reviewed, contact us — we will refund the fee if the upgrade has not been used.

4. Featured blog posts

A featured blog post is a one-time fee for an article promoting your business on the blog.

• You send us a brief; we write, edit and publish the article. Editorial control stays with us: we may change the angle, headline, wording and images, and we may decline a brief or business we are not willing to write about.
• Included: the article published on the blog, a link to your website and your directory listing, and placement in the blog's featured section.
• Not included: any guarantee of traffic, sales, search rankings or indexing by search engines, and no fixed publication date.
• If we cannot or will not publish the article, we will refund the fee.
• Once published, the article normally stays on the blog. We may update, unpublish or remove it if it becomes inaccurate, misleading or unlawful, or if the promoted business no longer exists.

5. Acceptable use

Do not submit or send us anything that is unlawful, misleading, defamatory, discriminatory, obscene, or that infringes someone else's rights; do not impersonate another business or person; do not submit listings you are not entitled to submit; do not attempt to disrupt the site, scrape it at a rate that degrades it, or gain access to parts of it you are not authorised to use. We may suspend or remove accounts and content that break these rules.

6. Your content and our content

• You keep ownership of the material you send us (listing details, logos, briefs).
• You give us a licence to store, edit, publish and promote that material on this site and in related promotion of the directory, for as long as your listing or article is published.
• You confirm you have the rights to everything you send, including any logo or image.
• The site itself — its design, code, taxonomy, editorial articles and branding — belongs to Open Web Directory and may not be copied or republished without permission.

7. Third-party services and links

Payments are handled by our payment provider, and accounts and hosting are provided by our platform provider. Their terms also apply where they are the ones supplying the service. Directory listings and articles link to websites we do not control; we are not responsible for their content or their handling of your data.

8. Availability

The site is provided as it is. We work to keep it available and accurate, but we do not promise uninterrupted service, and we may change, suspend or withdraw features (including paid upgrades) at any time. Where we withdraw a paid upgrade you have bought and cannot provide it, we will refund it.

9. Our liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Beyond that, we are not liable for lost profits, lost business or lost rankings, and our total liability to you is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the previous twelve months and £100. The directory is an information service; decide for yourself whether a business is right for you.

10. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the site changes. The date at the top shows the current version, and material changes will be flagged on the site. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms.

11. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and its courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, this does not remove any protection you have under the law of the country you live in.