Your Style-Guide is your Client’s API
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008In my opinion, an API should be many things. Perhaps the most important thing it should be is easy to use. If it isn’t easy to use (because documentation is poor, naming in inconsistent, or because it’s just not well thought out or organized) than it will likely only lead to frustration. Not only will it be difficult to develop on a poorly thought-out API, but it will be incredibly difficult to maintain and extend an application built on this poor API. I’ve been thinking a lot about style guides recently, and the troubles clients often have when they can’t effectively use the site styles we (developers/designers) have put together for their project. With that in mind I wanted to talk about how your style-guide is your client’s API. You are the programmer/developer/frontendguy/whatever. You have put together an incredible application that allows the client to create and maintain pages (complete with enough Ajax to sink a ship). Now you hand the application over to the client, and they need to begin the process of populating content.