I’ve never really created something with a plan in hand.

I am the kind of builder who puts together a house by eyeing it. Blueprints? A schedule? Who needs ‘em! I can guess on how much wood, shingles and plaster I need. Be glad I’m not a builder.

And while this strategy has served me well over the past 27 years, I’m beginning to learn that for large projects, having a blueprint is not a bad idea.

As I write more and more of my own code and decipher the old writings of previous designers, the more and more I realize the value of a plan and organization.

One of the best bits of advice I can give any Web site creator is to be organized and think what another might encounter if he or she opened your coding and had to perform maintenance on it.

Don’t name your styles in a style sheet by the attributes that they describe. In other words, no classes called “orangetext” for text that’s supposed to be orange. What if you want to make that text blue? The best style classes and ids match their function, such as “.middle p,” which might be a way of styling the text of a middle paragraph. It really depends on the project and your needs.

MySpace, incidentally, is one of the most high-profile offenders for its CSS. Among the classes: .blacktext12, orangetext15, .btext and .redbtext.

Also, be sure to leave commented out text in your style sheets and coding so sections of code can be easily searched for or identified.

I’ve long looked at the CSS on my blog and thought I should clean it up. While organizing and trimming code will make my pages leaner and easier to maintain, I am afraid that erasing one class or attribute that I made many months ago will cause my design to unravel.

This is the problem with large Web sites that have been around longer than this blog. Multiple users have multiple ways of doing things. Rather than carefully scoping out the coding of another, these users go in and lay down their own conventions. This create redundancies and also bloats  the size of the coding. Good luck going in and trying to fix something. I think that’s why you’ll find so many !important’s in large site style sheets.

This much advice I can offer. As for planning, I need to stop making it up as I go and actually outline the names, styles and organization I’ll need before I write something up. This will help me cut down on bloated coding, debugging and maintenance time.

I could never write one, but I know many of my high school teachers loved when we outlined what we were going to write in an essay before we wrote it. Again, this felt very unnatural to me. I write as I go along! An outline seems to destroy writing as a creative, exploratory process.

But, an outline saves a ton of time, and when project deadlines are tight, going into it with a plan might not hurt, even if it’s not that much fun.