Methodology & Sourcing

What this directory is

A provenance-disciplined reference database whose records render as server-rendered HTML pages, each carrying Schema.org JSON-LD baked into the initial response. It currently holds 10394 entity records: 38 materials, 4383 products, 314 manufacturers, 277 suppliers, 93 trade organizations, and 5289 permitting authorities, plus 22 in-depth guides and 4814 per-city hubs.

It is a reference asset first: the goal is accurate, machine-readable roofing facts that people and answer engines can rely on and cite. The tools on the site (like the instant-estimate calculator) exist alongside that mission and never change what the reference pages say.

Who runs this site — and how it makes money

The Roofing Book is built and maintained by a working Colorado roofing professional with years on Front Range roofs — the permit rules, hail realities, and code details here are maintained by someone who deals with them for a living.

Transparency about the business model: the site is free to use and earns money in two ways. The instant-estimate tool connects homeowners who ask for a quote with vetted local contractors (starting with the professionals behind this site — contact happens only with your explicit consent, and seeing your estimate never requires giving contact information). And jurisdiction Supplement Packs — expanded per-city requirement PDFs with verbatim ordinance citations — are sold to contractors and homeowners who want the paperwork in one place.

One commitment governs both: no reference fact on this site is ever altered, shaded, or omitted to generate a lead or a sale. Every entity page says what its cited source says, whether or not that is commercially convenient. If you ever believe a page violates that, use the corrections link below — that report goes to the top, because the accuracy of these pages is the entire point of the site.

How every fact is cited, dated, and checked

Each record carries a last_verified date and a source URL, emitted as Schema.org dateModified. Stable facts inherit the record’s citation; volatile facts — a product’s warranty terms, a branch’s hours, a jurisdiction’s permit rule — carry their own field-level citation and date, so freshness is tracked exactly where facts actually change. Every page ends with a Sources block listing the cited URLs and their most recent verification dates.

Before any record is published, it passes an eight-stage automated validation gate: completeness, field types and allowed values, per-field citations, and cross-references between records (a product’s manufacturer must resolve to a real manufacturer record). The same gate runs on every path into the database, and a batch publishes only if it produces zero errors. Cited source URLs are re-checked weekly by an automated freshness pipeline.

Discontinued and no-longer-listed products

The publisher of The Roofing Book owns a roofing contracting business. Product status records report what manufacturers’ own documents say about a line.

A product is recorded as discontinued only on the manufacturer’s own notice, press release or page saying so. When no manufacturer document can be found, a record may instead rest on two dated bulletins from distributors under separate ownership; the product page says so and names both distributors. A line the manufacturer simply no longer shows is labeled no longer listed, with the date it was checked, and is never counted as discontinued.

These records describe product lines. They do not identify the products on any specific roof, and they do not give advice on insurance claims.

Why this makes the data citable

Pages are pure server-rendered HTML: a crawler or answer engine that fetches the raw document — without executing JavaScript — sees both the human-readable content and the structured data. Each page carries a precise Schema.org type, a dateModified, and, for organizations, a sameAs link to the entity’s authoritative homepage for identity reconciliation.

National specs and local records are tagged distinctly in the structured data — exactly the boundary answer engines need when deciding what to quote for a "near me" versus a "what is" question.

Corrections and updates

Found something out of date or wrong? Provenance is only as good as its corrections loop. You can email a correction with a source. Manufacturer and supplier listings also carry a "claim this profile / suggest an edit" link on the record itself.