When working in teams, especially those that are based in different locations (or even different businesses) it’s important for the sharing or handover of production code to be as in-depth as possible.
Extensive documentation and a face-to-face run-through of what has been implemented will help, but things that crop up during the build process can often be forgotten by the time a handover occurs.
An excellent way to combat this is for documentation to exist, in snippets, within the codebase itself. This can then be processed into a living styleguide, which shows all the components of a websites framework and describes how to create and implement them.
All built by the framework itself. Inception.
The reason Bootstrap is so popular is that its great documentation make it easy for developers to integrate.
Creating a living styleguide similar to Bootstrap’s docs makes it quicker and easier to get a new developer immersed in a project and reduces the amount of time spent on creating new templates or maintaining older ones.
Putting it into practice
We recently used hologram to build a living styleguide for a one of our startup clients.
This means they’re not tied down to using us for any future updates to their site, allowing them the freedom to take the work we’d done and have it maintained either in-house or by another agency or freelance developer.
As yet though they haven’t, and we’re happy about that.
Get in touch
Mat Hayward - Co-founder & Operations Director