I've seen it both ways. I worked at a company that cranked out 4,000 sites a year. The only way they could do that was by having implicit coding standards. Eve

I've seen it both ways. I worked at a company that cranked out 4,000 sites a year. The only way they could do that was by having implicit coding standards. Every bit of code you've written has already been done the same way by ten other developers, 1,000 times over. It also made maintaining the sites super easy since within a few months you knew 99% of the layouts of every site which was built in the last three years. On the flip side, for smaller agencies and smaller projects I agree with the author. Trying to impose standards actually hurts the process. Maybe I want to use LESS or some other technology which would vastly improve the code and process, but not make the code super easy to maintain for the next guy. If you only have a few hundred sites, this becomes more manageable. Besides, do you impose standards on yourself when you're doing projects for yourself or for freelance work?