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Leaving aside such questions (and answers) I asked myself a more important question that rises every time that a new idea/law comes into discussion - there are a lot of countries in Europe and on other continents that have good and even great law systems, why are we still wasting time on comming up with new ideas instead of just using the ideas that have proven to be good?

And here is where software comes in. As programmers we could re-invent the wheel every day - fortunately we don’t have to, because there are Portals out there and web parts and Code Plex and a whole bunch of components that can make our lives easier.

It is obvious that we cannot ALWAYS use such components, but most of the times (80 - 90 %) we sure can. The remaining 10 - 20 % becomes our daily assurance and insurance of being a developer and not a button pusher.

It is also obvious that there are many of us out there that do not use existent components even when they fulfill 99% of their current requests (the 1% being the logo image on the front) and they insist in wasting/spending days to rewrite the code that someone else before them has already written and tested and updated.

The 10 reasons listed in this article ( and my comments on each) are:

4. Flexible time. ( I also agree here, although I am more productive in the morning rather than late at night, so my home schedule is 9 to 6 just as the office schedule is.)

5. More focus on results, not presence. ( presence as not being late in the morning, presence as office dress code, presence as socializing - although this part can actually be fun if you are lucky enough - , presence as long meetings with the management. )

6. More time with family. ( reading the blogs of other many freelance consultants, I have seen that a common good side effect of freelancing is the ability to actually be a parent not only by name or circumstance)

7. Work in your underwear. ( no comment )

8. Yoga at your desk. ( you can replace the commute time with jogging in the park time. Or just jogging around the neighborhood.)

9. Less commute. Less pollution. ( not on my side )

SharePoint is a very large application/system/portal and it takes a very long time to learn all its features, strong and weak points and even just to learn how to work with it. We may very easily get lost in it and even though we read books and articles about it, we will soon forget all the interesting things we’ve learned if we don’t actually use them in the real world.

Taking all this into consideration, it may sometimes be easier for us to think about custom-made functionality when we have to implement something, rather than to think about how we can achieve what we want with what SharePoint has to offer.

The article also says that, when a new functionality in a portal is discussed, it pays off to think about how you can achieve it with a custom-made solution, but also how SharePoint existing features would achieve it and to compare the 2 solutions, having in mind the fact that SharePoint existing functionality brings many advantages, as security, speed and unity.

These ideas also apply to Master Pages, as they are also a customization of a SharePoint existing feature.
Have you ever received the request to eliminate some functionality from a masterpage - such as the dropdown list of the Search control, or the My Site link ? You definitely have, especially if the design you had to implement was not created by you, but by a designer with no knowledge of SharePoint. And have you ever did that in order to implement the design as provided, to later see the Search functionality replaced with a custom control? I am sure you have done that or at least witnessed it at a point.

As SharePoint Master Page designers and developers, we are the first ones that can draw the attention on this issue - we are the ones that can prevent the occurrence of the above mentioned mistakes and watch over the implementation of best practices. We must draw attention to the fact that SharePoint functionality is there for a reason and not only to that. SharePoint users must not be confused by the design customization - being used to the default SharePoint interface, they must not find the new design hard to use and tricky. All the SharePoint controls must remain in the custom design. If they are moved around on the page, their layout must be consistent between all the pages and sites and also, easy to spot.

The design is the first thing a user sees on a page and its 2 goals (equal in importance) are to skin the page and make the usage easy and painless.

In conclusion, best practices start on day 1 of the project and every single element of customization must oblige to them, even at the cost of not following the Master Page design by the letter. 

If you work with a masterpage, you will probably set in code values for DefaultMasterPageURL and CustomMasterPageURL.

There is one more property of a SharePoint site called AlternateCssUrl. You would use this property if you don’t want to create a MasterPage or a Theme, but just apply a skin on the SharePoint default look - by specifying a value for this property, you make SharePoint include your style sheet in its pages.
 
Although it would look like the AlernateCssUrl property has a very limited use, you could not be more mistaken. There are pages in SharePoint that do not implement any masterpage - not the default.master, not the application.master. One example is the Picture Slideshow page.