What to ask your agency about CSS architecture

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on CSS architecture, these questions are worth asking early.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Naming conventions prevent the specificity arms race. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Deleting CSS should be as easy as adding it. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What this looks like day to day

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Three things worth confirming about CSS architecture before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Custom properties centralise the values you change most — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.