Sep 09 2008
Website Directory Structure
Every site - even if it’s a small website or is a large website - has a hierarchical website structure. This has to be simple and easy to follow, both for the website designer or to the user. This helps on easy editing and navigation within the site.
If a website directory structure is built as a hierarchical one, it will allow anybody who is editing it to easily find files, even if it’s a large website and has tens or hundreds of pages and files. From the user point of view a page has to be easily reachable from the website basic homepage.
A website file structure can contain:
- A homepage is the page which is first opened when somebody types a domain name into a browser. Usually called index.html or index.php and it’s located on the root directory of your website.
- One or more subdirectory folders, usually each of them contains a main page (/foldername/index.html)
- Subsequent pages located in these directories (ex: something.html or some-file-name.html)
- A main graphics folder in case of the smaller sites (ex: /images/ or /imgs/ or /graphics/)
- A graphics folder in each sub directory folder in case of the larger sites (ex: /about/images/)
- A folder for the website style sheets (files which have .css extensions)
- A js directory for javascript files
- In case of the larger websites there are many other files in use which require putting them in separate subdirectories, so the website structure will be easy to remember.
There are a few basic steps required to build a simple website structure:
- Split your website into logical sections, called subdirectory folders.
- Create the folders for /graphics/ and /styles/
- In the case of a simple website, create a basic page called home page and save it as index.html in the root directory
- Create the index.html pages for all of the subdirectory folders (But not for /graphics/ and /styles/)
- Create as many pages as you think it’s necessary and put them into the proper folder.
- If there are lots of pages and it would be too much to put all into one subdirectory, then it’s always wise to create subdirectory of a subdirectory and place them there. Just be sure you don’t complicate these dierectory structures too much. If you still feel that you need more and more pages and the structure would be too complicated, then consider splitting your website into subsections and use subdomains for them.
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