If you’re in a long-term relationship with your website, design for the future.

Slabs under houses, wiring and plumbing behind walls…I’m not a construction contractor, so I can’t tell you why it’s done this way, but I can tell you what mystifies me about these construction methods: they make it hard to fix things.

Our new house is built over a crawl space and a partial, unfinished basement. It may not be the prettiest place down there, but it is possible to get at things that might need to be inspected or fixed eventually.

In a foundation slab with plumbing (or who knows what else) embedded in it, access isn’t nearly as straightforward and is much more painful to contemplate.

Imagine a house where there are panels you could remove (without a jackhammer, I mean) to get at the wiring or plumbing anywhere in the house. Cleverly camouflaged, narrow (but not too narrow) panels running floor to ceiling, between floors, between rooms.

Now imagine all of the wiring and plumbing itself being constructed of modular components that could be swapped out when necessary.

It would take some foresight and up-front planning to design this way. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to enjoy the benefits?

Web design is frequently done under a lot of time pressure and with a flood of incoming information, ideas, and design requirements. In putting your own site together, be good to your future self: spend some time up front thinking about how you’re going to test and maintain the site and how you can make it easy to change layout or other aspects of the site later. You won’t be able to plan or execute this perfectly, but even some efforts along these lines may save you your sanity down the line.

What have you learned to do (probably learning the hard way) in designing your websites? Please share your strategies in the comments.