Best practices for creating a customizable website (html/css)

Hi all,

I’d like to have your opinion about best practices or guidelines that you recommend when designing the html/css for a website that needs to be easily customizable for any customer preferences.

I’m refactoring from scratch an existing website, and one of the critical areas is to improve the customization task and avoid as much as possible touching the html when installing the website in a customer. It should be only used css files for this customization.

The existing site have a lot of mistakes (using tables for layouts, badly organized css, etc), so I have some guidelines is mind to serve as base to our dev team:

  • Use only tables for tabular data (results lists, repeatable html)
  • Use divs when building page layouts
  • Use proper html semantic in content display (SEO)
  • Never user inner css in html tags. Use css classes
  • Organize css with two files: general css (reusable classes, base html markup) and specific.css (specific css organized by form)

Based on your experience, can you recommend other guidelines that I should take in consideration?

Many thanks!

Rui