"Design is not what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works"
“And what if you do it quick and dirty?”
When buying, let’s say, a car or house, do you make a decision based on price alone? Do cheap products always mean you save money and get most of your investment in the long run? Obviously, not.
Then why are you ready to neglect code quality in your Zendesk help center theme and get a cheaper and quicker option that simply ‘seems to look good’ at first sight?
Imagine your Zendesk Guide template is a house and every change is a new remodel. If you don't have a strong foundation, ultimately you'll be in the situation where you will need to rebuild the whole house just to support a new deck or a balcony.
The same applies to Zendesk help center - if you choose quick-and-dirty programming and don’t build a strong foundation for future, the cost of maintaining the custom theme can often be much higher than its initial price.
What is a ‘quick and dirty’ code
‘Quick and dirty’ means that developers write code as quickly as possible by, for example, copying pieces from other projects, creating long functions that perform a wide variety of only loosely related tasks, not checking the result for responsiveness and accuracy, ignoring peer review to detect bugs and bad design in advance and other technical details.
Example of unreadable code on Zendesk help center
Avoid problems with Zendesk’s built-in features
Specialists who are not authorized Zendesk experts may overlook some hidden features due to limited knowledge of Zendesk functionality. This may result in non-professional cluttered look of some pages on your help center.
Your search may look like this if you don’t know this hidden Zendesk feature
Why is sloppy code bad for your Zendesk help center theme
Here are just a few consequences for your Zendesk Guide:
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Readability. When a Zendesk help center theme gets passed on to another developer, clean and well written code will be much easier to read and understand. Good quality code saves time in the long run.
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Maintainability. It is easier, safer and less time consuming to adapt, extend or modify clean code in your Zendesk help center theme. And, of course, you aren’t planning to contact those who created your Zendesk Guide template every time you need to make tiny changes or fix something because it’s hard and time consuming for your developers to understand that ‘quick-and-dirty’ code. In some cases the code is so difficult to read that developers would rather rewrite existing code instead of doing the hard work of comprehending it.
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Errors and bugs. Developers who write code quickly save time on reviews. The result is problems found only after the custom theme was installed on your Zendesk help center. It can happen the same day or after a month or two when your Zendesk Guide is visited by lots of customers. Such problems will involve additional costs which could be eliminated by improved testing.
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Developer motivation. Developers get more job satisfaction out of the quality than the quantity of work. When the easy things become hard or when your developers have to get up at night to fix issues with the code, they start thinking of leaving their workplace.
You certainly don’t want to wake your developer in the middle of the night to fix bugs.
Developers at Lotus Themes pay special attention to code quality and do everything to make your life easier. Thus, you won’t have to contact us in future if you want to make small changes. To modify your Zendesk help center theme, you only need to be familiar with HTML and CSS. Our prices are final and you won’t have to pay more in future because it’s too time consuming to understand the code.
Our customers never say: “More careful testing would have saved money” because they got a Zendesk help center custom theme tested to the hilt.
