We consider ourselves professionals. Professional's design the inner workings of the program code first, defining how the system architecture will be constructed. The professional established coding standards, including how to name properties, events, methods, tables, fields, etc. The professional plans the system internally before writing a single line of code. An amateur rarely does any of these things. It ispossible for a professional to envision the solution in his or her head while creating a orocess, flow document, storyboard, timelines, resource management while writing some code. 

Professionally written programs have common characteristics. Some of the basics:

• Documented
• Maintainable
• Scalable
• Robust
• Secure  

We have developed clear, well documented set of coding standards, covering all of the items above, and more. These coding standards save us all a lot of time in the long run. Remember the old saying "pay me now or pay me later", a poorly designed application will break, perform slower, is usually less secure, and almost always more trouble to enhance, fix or modify. How much time do you think your organization will spend on those problems, just in downtime alone, over the life of the application? What about the cost of having pricy developers fix and maintain the application(s)? A few hours more in the beginning and along the way will save you ten fold in the future.