Inway Hosting Blog

Maintaining An Organized Website By Terry Jones

One of the services I offer my customers is to install scripts and help maintain their web sites.

What I find the first time I access their web site can only be describes as horrific!!

No file organization, no naming conventions, copies of files and redundant files everywhere.

It is important to maintain your web site in an organized and orderly fashion so that the ability to link your files together becomes a lot easier and efficient.

As a web visitor to a web site like http://www.easywebresources.com you won’t notice all of the files that make up the web site but as owner and administrator I know exactly how the files are organized. There are dozens of files that make up that web site and I have seen some web sites that can have hundreds and even thousands of web pages, files and download documents so without some sort of organization you would be lost.

The first thing to do is to setup a web site structure in a logical way so you can find types of documents/files easily.

For example, most web sites contain some sort of images/graphics files that are used for headers or pictures so these types of files should be stored in a folder called (strangely enough) images.

Most good web hosting companies will provide you with a folder called cgi-bin. This folder generally is used for server side cgi scripts that add functionality to your web site. Things like guest book scripts, visitor counters etc. These scripts would be installed in the cgi-bin folder.

If you store documents on your web server then you might create a documents folder and store your online documents in there. If you write articles then you might have an articles folder as well.

So now we have the following folders -

images
cgi-bin
documents
articles

Of course these folders could have subfolders so you might have subfolders in your articles folder relating to each category you might write about e.g articles/health and artcles/computers etc.

You will also find that there are ‘system’ folder located with the folders you create. These system folders should be left alone because, as their name implies, they are used by your web server for system functions like storing your incoming email etc. If you are not sure of a particular folder the safer to leave it alone or ask your web host support.

Now when you access your web site using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Program like WSFTP or SmartFTP, you will find it normally puts you ‘sitting’ just under the web root of your web site.

You can tell that by the folders you can see when you first log in. Generally you will see some sorts of mail folders (they will have mail in their names) and perhaps a log folder – these are examples of the ‘system’ folders I mentioned before.

This area under the web root is NOT accessible from the web so your web visitors would never see any of the files or folders that are located in here. It is a good place to store password files and other documents you wish to keep secure from the web.

There will also be a folder that is accessible from the web and it will be called something like ‘xxxxxxxx-www’ (where xxxxxxxx is your web site user name normally) or it could be called something like ‘public_html’. If you are unsure then ask your web host support.

This public or web accessible folder is where you create your home pages and other web pages, files, articles and documents that you want web visitors to be able to access or that you want to create links to in your web pages.

So you FTP to your web site, click on the public folder to open it up and start creating your folder structure in there. As I mentioned earlier, if you are using a decent web hosting company, you should already see a cgi-bin folder there as a bare minimum.

I hope I have managed to stress the importance of keeping your web site organized and explained, at least a little, how your web site should be structured.

Terry Jones owns and operates http://www.easywebresources.com. His web site offers hints and tips on setting up your web site including script installations, script & tool reviews for your web success.