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illicotch.com -
Help - Starting your
own website- Organize Your Work
Organize Your Work
One of the questions that people who are new to web design ask me first is how should I organize my files in my computer?
Of course you can do whatever you want, but here's what I do.
First I make a folder with the name of the site that I working on. In this case it's "Lillicotch". Inside this folder I have 3 sub-folders.You could have more, but this is how I organize mine.
The first is usually called "public_html". This is the first folder that
you will see when you use FTP (more on this later) to log into your web host.
Depending on your web host I have seen this folder called "html" or just
the name of your site (yoursite.com). In this folder I only keep the most
current files that I plan to have in my website. In other words it's my current
site. Try to keep your old files out of this folder. Keep in mind that if
you delete or move a file from this folder you will also need to do the same
on your site on your web host. Changes can just be overwritten, but deletions
must be done manually.
The reason that this folder is the same name as the the main folder on your
webhost is that when you are making changes to your site and you want to
put them up on the web it just takes one click to transfer all of your changes.
See my FTP section.
The second folder I call old. That is where I keep a copy of all of my old
pages. Before I make a change to any of my pages I make a copy and past it
into this folder. I then rename this page with a number at the end. For example
the first page is called index.html when I copy that in the the "old" folder
I then rename it to "index1.html". If I make more changes to this page I
copy and past it into the "old" folder and rename it "index2.html" and so
on.
That way if I ever want to go back and use something that I have changed
it is still there for me.
The third folder is just called "stuff" .That's where I keep all of the stuff that I accumulate for the site. That can be the original photo's that I have edited to use on the site, text documents or many other files that I may or may not use for the site. In any case it's a good idea to keep it all.
