Week Six | Part One: Site Structure

Organizing Your Site.

The single most important factor in Web site administration is a well-organized Web site. Without one a designer will waste time looking for files, maintaining files, and placing files into a document.

To illustrate this point, I have provided a screen grab of my local Web site (the one on my computer) and my remote Web site (the one connected to the Web).

Not all the folders and files on my local computer are loaded onto my Web server, but the structure is identical for both.

My local Web site.

My remote Web site.

The reason has more to do with personal memory than anything else. If I am creating new files (such as my weekly lectures) or updating existing files (such as images or Acrobat files) it simply makes sense to build and follow the same file paths. This makes PUTTING and GETTING files using FTP far easier, and I am less likely to upload or download files into the wrong directory. I am also guaranteed the file paths I create on my local site will work on my remote site, as well.

You will notice that each section of Big Plum is organized into its own folder both locally and remotely. For example, DES 3006:

To make maintenance easy for me, I park all my files in unique directories:

I keep all my images for DES 3006 in an images folder. This way, when I'm in PhotoShop, I don't have to hunt around in order to open, create, edit, or save optimized files.

I use the same method for my lecture pages. This way, when I am using my HTML editor, I can open, create, edit or save files much more conveniently because they are all in the same place.

I could have created unique folders for each weekly lecture, but this would have over-complicated things. Since I am constantly creating hyperlinks that reference information from other weeks, I know how confusing and time-consuming it would be to bounce from folder to folder looking for the right document and coding the <a href> for it.

Every person likes to organize things in their own way, and with your own Web site you have the freedom to be as tidy as you like. It is when you have many people creating and adding content to the same Web site that production can be enhanced or broken by a well-organized site structure.