Coding Standards

This question is really about standards.

I am running a few projects using freelancers as coders (all web based technology) who will be working from a Functional Specification. The specification will for example say that menu should behave in a certain way; for example slide down and show the user the options and upon mouse over highlight in blue.

This can be approached in a number of different ways, not least which script to write it in but also how it is scripted.

I want to give guidance on the way the page is scripted. Although the page will be fully tested, my other priority is maintainability of the page especially as the page may be amended by another developer at another date.

I am thinking of giving the freelance coders a standard to go by to ensure that the way in which the code is written is best practice and will leave the page flexible for future development and amendments. I know the latter is difficult but I’m sure there is an approach that will in some way help support this. The main codes I will be using are likely to be:

WordPress
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
Flash
XML (feeds from WordPress)
JQuery

Are there any recommendations on how I could approach this in giving some guidelines to ensure a certain good level of coding is done by the freelancers and the quality of the code is good and supports the page being maintainable for the future?

Are there any naming strategy’s that could be useful to use for example..

Regards
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