Architecture

How many of you have actually seen the code of your website?

Almost all never see the architechture that is the foundation of their site.  Many duck quickly under "I'm not technical enough to understand" which is most often true but that still enables back-end code to run rampet in all directions - spagetti code as has been described.  

Clients come with content and a site is built to that content.  As the site is built to that content, more content comes but it's different in structure - the architechture is cobbled into place.

When code is built around a client's content, the standards and naming conventions are commonly associated to the content.  The same architechture cannot be re-used effectively then for another client - or when it is, the associated names are no longer matched to the content.  This type of code structure can last years, upon years.  Crawling through code to make a change can take hours upon hours of tracing just to make a simple change.

Clients maintain the site over time - where they have control, they man-handle the content around the template - introduce disparities in structure.  When the site is upgraded in the future - no longer is global control possible.