By having a style guide, you can ensure everything you present to customers and potential customers is consistent and supports your brand. For instance, if someone reads a formal letter from you then visits your casual website, they will notice the difference and probably feel uncomfortable with it.

Style guides can be in bullet point on one page or they can be comprehensive manuals – it depends on the needs and size of the business. In fact, I have written both types for a single client as they used them for different purposes.

If you want to create a style guide, you can always start with the key points and slowly build it up as you gather further information to include.

A style sheet is a summary of a style guide that lists common words and how they are to be presented. For instance, does your business write Internet or internet? Or is Aussie acceptable or must it always be Australian?

P.S. I wrote a longer comparision betwen style guide and style sheet last Novemeber.

Which spelling you should use depends on who your readers are – if you want to attract Australian customers, use Australian spellings, and so on. If your domain ends with .au, then use Australian spelling and metric measurements even if you have an international audience – be proud of being Australian and use our conventions, especially as you have already announced your link to Australia.

As an Australian, I can read US spelling and understand it without too much effort (even when it annoys me on an Australian site!) and I believe that the Americans can cope with reading our spelling, too. I recently saw an Australian site with an explanation of the two spellings – to me, this implied that any Americans visiting the site were too stupid to understand ‘colour’ means ‘color’. That, or our spelling is somehow inferior and should be apologised for in case the Americans don’t like us.

Either way, it is not a good message to send and was a complete waste of the site owner’s time to prepare the table. So, be proud of our country and our conventions, and give others the courtesy that they are intelligent enough to respect and understand that.