Migrating/Creating New Styleguide for a new site (A pretty large site)
Hello all! I've recently got onto a new client project as a Webflow Dev/Designer and going through the site, it's clear that best practices or a structured style guide was not used and built throughout the life of the website (not well, I might add)
I've migrated a site before, but not one with 70k+ users monthly, how have you guys approached this in the past?
4 Replies
Hey Alex congrats on the new client! There’s a lot of “it depends” here
If the job is to clean up the site then starting from scratch might be best option. You’d have to be careful upfront with your plan to migrate everything to ensure no loss in traffic of course.
If you aren’t comfortable with that you can always just remove it from scope of work I.e. “I will deliver a fresh Webflow project to your account but will not migrate the domain”
And then you can recommend someone / refer
If a new site isn’t an option then you’ll have to comb through the site to find where layouts and elements are resused and just build on top of everything. Might be helpful to just copy the project and have a playground for a bit and copy pasta from your playground into the “real” build
My main suggestion would be to charge hourly here. Anytime I’m working in someone else’s codebase I do this because I can’t guarantee someone else’s work. You could run into A LOT of issues that will end up taking more time to fix than if it was a fresh build.
If you don’t want to charge hourly then at least some way to protect yourself here.
I.e. milestone
Beautiful, thanks for the extensive answer here. The client is more of a retainer/contract deal, so I'm there go-to for all things Webflow and Design. So I would be compensated fairly, but at the end of the day, the implementation of something like this is huge...
Sometimes I can't tell if my perfectionism is kicking in and wanting to have things follow strucutre for future ease-of-use. But there would be no deadline on something like this.
So I'm assuming I could incrementally start building out each page under a new structure/framework (there are already so many Div-###). What do you think about this approach?
And implement a "second styleguide" where, when I have time, I could incrementally rebuild old and necessary pages out in the new style.
Some insights into the base style guides. This is the first section. There is no "Heading" section to track heading tags, let alone cohesive sections at all really... So, I feel I can only go up from here.
yes agree with your approach here.