Q:

Best practice for attribute sets when importing products

I am setting a a magento site with multiple stores for a client. The client has hundred of products and I am using Magmi to import them. Many of these products are Configurable and so I was wondering if it is best practice to create a separate attribute set for each product?
As I understand it, this should give me lots of flexibility later on for adding attributes if required. However a draw back of this is a lot of manual work to go through, analyse the products and add their attribute sets in before importing them with Magmi... If anyone can give me some info as to what they do in these situations it would be much appreciated. 
Cheers!

A:

With regard to attribute sets, you'll want to first identify the different types of products and assign attribute sets to those.
For example:
The Red Men's T-Shirt should have a T-Shirt attribute set, as should the Blue Women's T-Shirt.
However, the Men's Jeans should have a Pants attribute set.
If you have a new attribute set for each product, this is going to make adding a new attribute an absolute nightmare for you.
Attributes aren't active until they're assigned to an Attribute set, so if you have thousands of products and each has their own dedicated attribute set, then you'll need to add your new attribute to every single one of these manually, should you create a new attribute.
So, in answer to your question, yes this is bad practice and will cause you innumerable issues further down the line. It's safer, cleaner and easier to separate your products into like-ranges and use a single attribute set to represent each product in this range.

