Organizing Your Site

Foresight

Whether you are building a site on Geocities or at your own domain, your site should be organized for convenience. This means convenience to you  and convenience to your audience. In the beginning when you build your site, you may just haphazardly name files and place them all in the same directory. If your site grows, so does the root directory. This makes it difficult to locate files you need to edit, files you might name similarly or even in the worst case scenario, you might overwrite files due to naming them the same. When your site becomes that huge, organizing would be a terrible chore. Hence you need to have foresight in organization.

With a new site, it is hard to believe it could ever grow past 5 pages and 4 images. However, when a webmaster has foresight that the site could grow, she will organize the site so that growth will be easily  accommodated.

Separation of Images and HTML

Most webmasters prefer to separate out the images from the root directory. Placing images in a separate folder called "images" allows you to keep your root directory clean, or strictly for the HTML files. When you do this, all your links to your images will be prefaced with a "images/" so that the HTML will point to the correct location on your web.

It is preferential for pages to share the same images instead of having duplicate images on the site. As you build your site, the images are isolated and easily located so that you can reference the same image in each HTML or select HTML to optimize the amount of space you take up on the server with your website. Not only do you share images with html pages, when you use a template of images, the actual template is written exactly the same so that it makes writing the HTML easier.

In the example on the right, there are20 items in your root directory. This can be organized to 5 pages and one directory in your root, thereby making it easier to scan through them.

Separation of HTML Docs

Larger sites or sites that plan on categorizing sub pages, will want to group like category pages in the same folder. This allows for linking directly to your folder for the default page to show up. Sub pages can be further organized and each folder may have its own images for those just used in HTML in that folder. Images shares across the folders will be placed in the main mages folder using the relative linking of "../images/" to reference one up image directory or "images/" to reference the image directory within the folder. This will eliminate huge image folders and make it easier to sort your HTML and keep track.

On the right there are a total of 16 pages. There are only 4 folders and one HTML page in the root. Each category folder has a subfolder for images used solely within the category and all the sub pages for that folder. This is organized for a medium size site.

Categories As Subfolders

There is no standard in this area, however, there is an intuitive and widely used classification for categories on sites. If a webmaster works within the common sense of a site, an experienced user can intuitively move about the site. This allows for your audience to use the site, and for your peers to help you with the site.

Suggestions for subfolders and their contents

• /images/ used for images
• /contact/ used for placing form HTML, contact information etc.
• /about/ used for HTML that details and describes your company.
• /info/ used for information about your company or for obtaining information
• /news/
• /help/
• /portfolio/ where you place information about your past works
• /help/
• /cgi-bin/ used for cgi scripts
• /private/ used for information to share between your webmasters but is password protected to the outside.
• /public/ used for showing clients works in progress
• /projects/ used for showing clients works in progress