a website is basically made up a files and folders that you create and upload
to web server
for other people to access, therefore it's very important that you have a file
management strategy
in place as you start building your website all the links on your website
depend upon on how you name it organize your files if midway through you decide
to reorganize
rename our move the files you could create
broken links on your site, the links can be fixed
but it's just easier if you start out doing the proper method
so the first thing i wanna talk about when
working the fire management is that you need to have a root folder
looking at my desktop I have two root folders for two different sites
one is a basic site root where you have just a few files
and then we have a complex site root
which has quite a few more files so when working with the basic site
or complex I it's important that all the
assets for that website are in that root folder
if you have HTML files, images,
movies, music, PDF files, word documents whatever
they all need to be inside of that group folder
you can't have anything outside like on your desktop or on a flash drive
because those things are not going to be something that you end up
uploading to the web server and then you can create broken links to your website
so make sure that all the assets or anything having to do with that website
is in the actual root folder so another thing
is when you create a root folder if you're going to have a really small site
with only a few pages with just a few pictures and one or two documents
whatever it may be
it's okay if you leave all the files in this top-level root folder
and truly even if you had a 100 or 200
it's up to you if you want to keep them on the top level the root folder
that is absolutely okay, the reason why it's harder when you have a lot of files
it's going to be harder for you to create links and find the right
file that you're looking for because it can just be too many
all in one folder so I highly recommend that if you're gonna have anything more
then a really basic site that you start out being
as organized as possible and again the reason why
is because all the links on your website depend upon how you organize your
website
so if after the fact you decide later on
that it is hard to look at work with all these files in one folder
and you wanna then make new folders rename files move files into folders
you're going to create problems on your website because it's gonna break some
of the links that you've created
and you'll have to go back in and fix those later and they can be fixed but it's
just kind of a headache so
when you're building website my recommendation is to be
as highly organized as possible from day 1
that you start working on this website, so for instance
in this website I have two kind of stand-alone page is that on
apart of a group or a section contactus.html
it's just a page that's going to be in my navigation menu
and it's not a part of the group and so I left it in the top level of
my website in the root folder, and the index.html is actually your homepage
now it's not like other pages where you can have the name contact us
or products or about us .html
you can't put something like home.html its has to be called index HTML
because that's where the web server looks for the default homepage of your
site
so make sure your homepage is always called index.html
and then as you can see I organized
all my stuff in this website into folders so for instance
in the about folder I have two pages one is called about
us .html and another one is history.html
so since those two things are going to be grouped together in a section in the
drop down menu
there together in a folder same thing with products I ever products page
skateboards longboards and surfboards
so again since their all going to be in the same section in the same drop down
menu
they are all in theirs there one folder so the
it easier for me to find those pages and then we have a
assets folder and inside of the assets folder I have a images folder and a
documents folder now if I had mp3 files or
audio files I can create a audio
folder or a movie folder or whatever you might have on your website
so in the images folder I have 6 images and in the documents I have two PDF
documents
so it's going to be a lot easier for me to find those files and create links to
them
now when creating links the last thing we're gonna talk about
are the rules you must follow first of all when you're creating
the file names for whether HTML, JPEG,
and MP3 anything your going to use on your website
you cannot use any caps whether it's all caps or just one or two letters no caps
at all
no spaces at all and no special characters like exclamation points or
question marks
so the right thing to do is make sure you're using
all lower case make sure that you don't have any spaces
and that you remove any special characters the only ones that
are allowed are underscores and hyphens
so there are three different ways you can work with spaces here
right here we have clearance sale .html
it doesn't have the space between the two words, this is absolutely fine
it's a little bit hard for people to read so that's not the way that I prefer to do
it but you can do this if you want to you
another way that you can distinguish between two words you can put an
underscore in between
again this is a perfectly fine method I don't use it though because
a computer only recognizes this as one word it doesn't realize that these are
two separate words
whereas with a hyphen it does recognize this as two separate words so it's
easier to find these files so this is the preferred method that I use when
naming folders naming files naming anything for website
is to use no capitals no spaces
and substitute a space with a hyphen and no special characters