How we choose

Every page on this site that recommends a product is selected against the criteria below. They are deliberately modest, because they are things you could check yourself — which is the point. A claim you can verify is worth more than one you cannot.

• Availability. Products that are genuinely on sale at the time the page is written or last reviewed. If something is discontinued or persistently out of stock, it comes off the page.
• Published specifications and materials. Fabric composition and weave, lining and coating type, cell structure and count, rod diameter and load rating, mount type, and the range of widths and drops actually offered.
• Fitness for the specific problem the page is about. A panel that is excellent for insulation may be the wrong answer for glare. Each page asks one question, and a pick has to answer that question rather than be generally good.
• The weight of aggregate owner feedback, read for recurring failure patterns rather than headline scores. A pattern of coatings cracking, of color varying between separately-ordered panels, or of a mechanism sticking tells you far more than an average rating.
• Whether the reader described on the page can actually fit it. A renter who cannot drill, a bay window, a shallow recess, a 96-inch drop. A recommendation that cannot be installed is not a recommendation.

We do not lab-test these products. We do not own a light meter, we do not run controlled trials, and we have not installed the products on this site. Where a page cites a measurement — a light-blocking percentage, a UV block figure, an R-value, a bracket load rating — it is a manufacturer’s published figure or a named third-party source, and it is labeled as such on the page.

This matters because several sites in this category claim exactly the opposite. Months of testing, lux meters, hundreds of raise-and-lower cycles — usually on an anonymous or single-name byline with no published protocol and no photographs of a test setup. We are not going to match those claims, because matching them would mean inventing them.

We are not paid by any manufacturer to include a product. We earn a commission when a reader buys through our links, and that has no bearing on what appears here or in what order. No manufacturer, retailer or advertiser sees a page before it is published.

We do not show prices, because we do not have a live price feed. Rather than publish a number that may be weeks out of date, every buy link says “Check price on Amazon” and takes you to the current listing. If that changes, prices here will carry a visible date and be refreshed daily — and any price older than 48 hours will disappear rather than mislead you.

We do not publish star ratings or review counts, ours or anyone else’s, and there are no customer testimonials anywhere on this site. We have no verified review data for Drape & Dawn, so there is nothing real to display.

We do not hold licensed photography of the products we recommend, and we are not going to put a stock interior next to a named product and let you assume it is that product. The photographs on this site are licensed stock images of rooms and windows — they illustrate the problem being discussed, never a specific item we are recommending. For pictures of a product, the retailer listing is the honest source, which is where every buy link goes.

• Product roundups are reviewed on a rolling basis for availability and for changes to the specifications we cited.
• Guides and comparisons are reviewed when the underlying advice changes — a new product category, a shift in what is commonly available, or a reader pointing out something we got wrong.
• Every page shows a “last updated” date in its byline, and that date reflects a real review rather than a build timestamp.

Tell us. Email janet.hoyo@yahoo.com with the page and what is wrong with it. Corrections are made promptly, and where a correction materially changes the advice the page carries a visible note saying what changed and when. The full policy is on the editorial policy page, and the commercial arrangements are set out in the affiliate disclosure.