After a long weekend of constant travel from Mississauga, to Buffalo, to Malton and an epic sunburn that can only be described as…epic, I’m reminded of the old scouts motto, be prepared. That applies to everything in life not just long car rides, massive mall crawling or beer induced suntans that could’ve been prevented with sunscreen.

Be prepared also applies to your job as well or in my case my job at Design Lab, as an Interface Developer. One of the best ways to be ready for anything in the world of CSS/HTML is template, template, template. Make templates of the work you always seem to be doing, lists, drop downs, image with text beside it, image with text beside it that wraps around the image, pagination, gallery lists etc.

I have a cheat sheet on my desktop of CSS code that I use all the time to save on time, along with Latin text to fill out sites to see how the code will re-act to large and small copy.

To stay on the ball and out of your PMs bad books keep the following cheat sheet on your desktop.

1. A full paragraph of Latin text or filler text to test out your work. Try to stick to dead languages, no Klingon please.

2 . An HTML template page of your designers favourite layouts / call outs / promos or common website architectures.

3. Instant Messenger -  to access other ID/Designers you work with or used to work with to bounce ideas off of or just double check your work.

4.  Any URLs that help you with anything and everything CSS/HTML w3schools.com, www.smashingmagazine.com, etc.

5. Toys. You need them. Be it Transformers, Tokidoki figures, or whatever, these items give you a quick break and let you relax before diving back into the storm.