Healthcare Best Practices

Work with the Future in Mind

Whether you're coding, styling, building, programming, whatever: work with the future in mind.

What does this mean exactly? It means don't quickie things. Build them so they give room and space for future elements and are smartly created so if something needs to be added or removed later, it can do so easily and without much effort.

Good Examples of This

Say you're building a newsletter on a clients site named the Healthy Living and are ready to upload the newsletters design images to the site, what is better: uploading them to the images folder, uploading them to a new folder named Newsletter under the images folder, or uploading them to a folder named Healthy Living, under a folder named Newsletter, under the images folder?>
To lay this out a little clearer:

• /images
• /images/Newsletter
• /images/Newsletter/Healthy Living

The answer is the last one.

Why? Well, what if they wanted to add another newsletter at some later date? If you chose the first solution, perhaps the images for the new newsletter would also be uploaded to the images folder, and now you have two sets of newsletter images jumbled up within all the other random images in the main images folder. Worse, if the first person named all of the images with just Newsletter-01 etc, and the next person creating their second newsletter also happened to name them that generic, you'll be overwriting the first newsletters images. Now the first newsletter is fuxxored. No bueno.

And what if you chose the second one? That is a generic folder name, and the person setting up the second newsletter now has to create another folder named something different. Perhaps later they will add even more newsletters, now you have a bunch of newsletter folders inside the main images folder that could be grouped into one folder, if named well from the start, and thus the images folder stays much more organized and easier to find things. And now the second person, if they are smart, must change the newsletter folders name to be the specific name of that newsletter and move it under a newsletter folder which will hold all newsletter image folders, then change all the image paths in the layout for that first newsletter to match the new path so that it isn't breaking the images, then finally get back to his newsletter. Waste of time. The first persons laziness cost the second person double the time it would have taken if done right in the first place.

Using the third option will make it so all the hassle explained above is avoided, and things are well organized and easily found. Win.