It’s all very well for developers to create visionary frameworks and applications that only they understand – that is the freedom that makes web development great – until someone on the outside tries to work with it!
As far as i’m concerned, at the very least, the view/template of a web application needs to be changeable even to a web designer who has zero to minimal experience working with dynamic websites. Why – when we can create “beautiful” applications with minimal code repetition – because you are breaking the brilliance of code seperation. Its no different to seperating style and content. Lets face – usually, designers are good at design, and programmers are good at programming. Therefore the two skills need to co-exist, happily.
5 Questions to ask yourself:
1. How long would it take a pure web designer (HTML + CSS only) to change any element on any page?
2. How long would it take an average programmer to make some basic functionality changes, such as adding a new database table and running some pre-existing sanitation functions?
3. I’m looking at the website index. If I download index.php (or whatever) how many breadcrumbs do I have to follow to change, for example, the sidebar?
4. Is the folder structure sensible, and have the old files and folders been deleted?
5. Am I coding in a style that only I fully understand, on a commercial project that may rightfully be worked on by other developers that I may never speak to?
