Version control: It’s one of those handy tools developers use to keep track of changes to a project. It also makes it easier to “code in the kitchen”, as it were, by allowing for small changes we may have come up with while, say cooking dinner or cleaning the house to be made and noted, so that we can come back later and decide if we want to keep the little change, or roll it back without having to dig through lines and lines of code to find and delete it. But did you know that Git (or any other method of version control, for that matter), can also be used for design, and even content writing?

I first came across version control in the form of Murcurial while working on a project last year with Monica that involved adding content to a hand-coded site. To be honest, at first, I thought the owner of the site was crazy for insisting on version control for a hand-coded, relatively simple site, but after having switched my own processes over to version control from plain-old work-as-you-go text files, I’m thankful I was introduced.

So how do you, as a content writer or designer, implement version control? There’s an excellent post over at Flywheel that will get you started. It lays out some reasons why version control, (specifically, Git), is a good for designers, and provides some free resources for getting started. Admittedly, the concept took me a while to get used to, and I ran into some issues while getting everything initially set up, but once I got rolling, I’ve never looked back.