A website style guide is a formal record of all the key design styles, standards and formats of your website design presented in a detailed document for you to keep and use whenever changes to your website take place.

 But do you really need one?

A website style guide can often be a very useful resource if you are planning to create a lot of custom pages yourself, or hand-off the ongoing management of your website's content to your internal team or third party providers and want them to have a definitive reference to follow.

 In many cases, particularly if you undertake all the design amendments yourself, or if your website is quite small in scale, you may decide you don't need one - especially as it may seem like an additional investment that extends the design phase and could just as easily be omitted altogether.

Although it is tempting to dismiss this step there are a number of advantages you should consider first. 

If you've just invested in having your website professionally designed, it's a good idea to protect your investment by ensuring the site can be easily and effectively updated by anybody after the design phase.

If your website forms part of a 'bigger picture' brand strategy, it's often worth taking the time to properly document how the website sits within the overall picture. In fact many organisations that have invested in their brand identity often already have a brand guideline document as part of their brand assets, and extending this to their website is a logical step.

Usually the bigger and more complex website you have, the more likely you are to want to document all the key elements of your website design. For example, if you have a lot of different types of creative assets such as multiple banners, promotions, animation, stock imagery, icons, tables, charts, diagrams etc., you may find yourself easily losing track of the specifications of each item unless you maintain a decent record on file.

If you have multiple personnel looking after the day-to-day updates of your site, a manual can be very handy to ensure design consistency is maintained over the longer term. Given that the nature of most websites is regular updates, there is always the opportunity for the consistency of your brand to diffuse over time if not rigorously managed.

Similarly, If you plan to hand off the design and/or maintenance of your website design to a 3rd party, you will likely need to provide them with a definitive guide of the intended design and structure for the site to ensure your website's design integrity is maintained.

A style guide can really help take stock of all key elements of your site, and more importantly understand the true value of what you have at the end of the website design process. Many designers will provide you with some concept screens that are intended to demonstrate the overall look and feel of your website. This is often adequate, but a style guide also provides you with an opportunity to explore a much deeper level of the design, giving you time to address any concerns and share amongst colleagues prior to the build phase, rather than after delivery when unforeseen changes can sometimes occur.

If you do decide to opt for a website style guide as part of your website project, it's best if you can receive it in a format that is easy to maintain. In many cases a designer will provide you with an editable PDF that can be amended on a day-to-day basis leaving you to go back to the designer only when larger design changes occur.

To save on cost, you can always document the key ingredients of your design yourself. In this case there's no real magic formula - all you need is a thorough understanding of your site, in particular all the elements that are affected by design, and be able to record them in a logical way. Obviously, this process is likely to be a lot more streamlined when you employ the expertise of a designer who is used to producing design manuals and already has an in-depth relationship with your website design.