Planning for Site Expansion

When you're designing a site, you take the time to think about the site navigation so that your site visitors will have an easy time finding the information they need. But what about your needs? While you're building and maintaining a site, it's just as important for you to plan the folder structure so that you can easily and quickly find items you need to work on. Web sites have a disturbing tendency to grow, so when you set up your site, lay out your folder structure logically, and leave room for expansion in your site structure ( Figure 16.1 ).

Figure 16.1. You should create your site structure with logical sections (shown here as folders), and plan for growth.

For example, if you have different sections of a site (as represented in the site's navigation), it's a good idea to create a folder for each section (which will contain all of the pages for the section). Then consider creating an images folder inside each section folder. After all, you will probably have images for each section that are used only in that section of the site. A separate images folder in the root of your site can handle images that are used globally throughout the site.

As your site grows, you can add additional folders for new sections from the site root, or you can add folders inside the existing section folders for new subsections.

Tips

• Make sure that you name your files and folders understandably. While you are creating a site, you may remember what the med_sec_hed.html file is used for, but when you come back to the site four months later, you might not have a clue, at least without opening the file and looking at it. Instead, name the file something like media_home.html , and it will make it easier for you to pick up where you left off. This also helps make your site easier for other people to maintain.

• Don't forget that there are some characters that you can't use in file and folder names , including space, #, &, @, /, and most other punctuation. Use a hyphen or underscore as substitutes for a space.

• If you create images folders inside section folders, give those images folders descriptive names, too. We like to use the name of the section, followed by an underscore, then images, like so: recipes_images .