The easiest way to define Best Practices is as a collection of policies and guidelines based on large amounts of education and industry-specific experiences. Such knowledge could take many years for one person to accumulate, but with official and published practices, this knowledge is distilled into small and digestible components. Individual programmers, designers, and developers, can benefit hugely from such an official rule set as they can completely by-pass the experience one would have to gain to acquire this knowledge, and can perform at best practice levels with a fraction of the education required to develop them.
In short, if you follow the adopted best practices, you can perform at the same level as a developer who's got 20 years of experience plus a relevant education including a few degrees. For the employer who has a programmer, developer, or designer on the payroll, the cost-savings here should be quite obvious. For the individual, the promise of the knowledge without the accompanying pain that experience always dishes out as part of the education process. The benefits get even more important when dealing with a team of programmers, developers, and/or designers. People in general will always perform to their level of standard, using their most comfortable skill-sets, to produce end results which fall into their perceived acceptable parameters. In other words, they'll do what's easiest and most familiar.
Problem here is that everyone will end up doing something a little different from the next. This is not a good situation in a team environment. If every team members adheres to adopted best practices, you can be assured that they all play by the same rules, and deliver end results falling into the same accepted parameters with the same levels of quality. Most importantly it's like having built-in knowledge sharing across the entire team of even the most advanced concepts.
From a management perspective it also removes all challenges from team members wishing to run on the bleeding edge. Any time a new idea comes forward (like "why don't we do it this way?") the answer can be a simple "'cause it's not in our best practices" and then can be tabled for review with the next update. If software programming, website design, or web development is a service you offer your clients, then having official best practices is an added marketing tool - it raises you above your competition in many cases where they don't have any or only limited documentation. As fun as gaining experience can be, sometimes a cheat-sheet can be more cost-effective.
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