In a new article on Sitepoint, David Mytton explains why coding standards are important not only to the individual developer or development team, but to the script users as well. He takes a problem-solution approach to creating maintainable code, peeks at different coding standards, and also has a zip file of his own coding standards that you may want to use.

This article, though brief, does provide some good guidelines for why coding standards should be your standards. The main reason to adhere to a coding standard is to keep things maintainable. Without a good, solid coding standard document (such as his sample here), code will just be flying all over the place, making it up as it goes along - and making it impossible to alter later as a result...

Thanks to PHP Magazine for the link.