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NAMING AND ORGANIZING YOUR WEBSITE FILES
Names
For the names of your folders and files,
use only lower-case letters. Absolutely NO spaces. Numbers are okay.
Underscores and hyphens are okay. Short, descriptive names are easiest to
work with. It is essential
that you understand the three different "names "associated with a file:
|
NAME |
EXAMPLE |
WHAT IT DOES |
| The file's name |
classes/frontpage/naming2.htm |
Tells the browser where
to find this file; gives its "path" |
| The page's title |
StarkeTech:
FrontPage Class - Naming and Organizing Your Website Files |
Could be the same |
Appears on the titlebar
and in bookmarks; identifies content for user; includes keywords for
search engines If not
specified, the default title is usually the file's name, like
index, or history, or faculty |
| The page's "essay" title |
Naming and Organizing
Your Website Files |
Appears at the top of
the document, establishes content topic |
Folders
For
a small website, keep your directory structure fairly "flat" until you know the
names of the different sections of your website. Keep all folders and files in one folder.
FrontPage will create several folders and files that will look unfamiliar to
you. If you want a special effect or component that requires FP
extensions, you must upload these folders and files; otherwise, just ignore
them. Image files in a
html document exist independently; they do not become part of the html document.
The html in the document specifies the location of the image file. For this reason,
image files have a maddening tendency to get lost if you make
changes in your site, particularly if you switch the document and/or image from one folder to
another.
 The HTML document
must "point" to the location of the image file. If you change the location
of the image file
and/or the html file and do not change the HTML instructions in the source
code, the viewer will see the infamous "lost image file" icon.
FrontPage creates a special folder for all your images to help you with this
problem.
Images Folder
If you store all your used images in one
folder (named images), you will avoid some of the problems with
the path if you change folders. If you keep all your un-used images in
another folder (images-unused), you can tell FrontPage not to
upload that particular folder. (Each of my websites has a special folder
named 1notposted. I keep not only my unused images there,
but also experimental and archival pages, along with notes.)
Path
If you
understand the concept of a "path," you will avoid many problems when
your website begins to increase in size. Note the forward and backward
slashes. A path is the
address of a file. It includes all the sub-folders and main folder in the
file's location and identifies the type of file by its extension. For
example, look at this path on the web-hosting server:
podunk/departments/science/nameteacher.htm
This html file is in a folder named science. The folder
science is in a folder named departments. The folder
departments is in the main website folder, podunk.
(Sometimes a web-hosting server will show your root folder as www.) On your
computer, this file would have the following path (varies with configuration):
c:\Documents and Settings\user\My
Documents\My Webs\podunk\departments\science\\nameteacher.htm
(FrontPage prefers that you store all your website files in a default folder:
My Web Sites (or My
Webs ). It's a good idea to humor FrontPage.)
Multiple Versions of Files
If you work on more than
one computer, you will have a problem of making sure you are working with the
most recent version of a file. FrontPage will automatically insert the
date a file was last modified--if you tell it to. Having a date on one of
my
webpages is not a service for the user; it's for me! (I
still manage to over-write files.)
Page Changed
09/09/2005
Website Construction
StarkeTech
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