Before you begin the hands-on building or upgrade of your web site, it’s good to put pen to paper or a whiteboard for the planning stages as it can save you a great deal of frustration later on.
Web pages breed like rabbits.
Web sites tend to grow past the original concept. My own site was originally 4 pages around 10 years ago. It now contains thousands.
By drawing a plan or site map of your web site, in the same sort of format as the Windows Explorer layout, (folders, subfolders and files) it helps you to visually categorize current and future development of the site.
Many site owners feel they will be able to “sort things out” after their site was finished. This has a tendency to lead to confusion, busted links and placeholders where images should appear. Another big concern is improper naming and location of files can have a major impact on search engine rankings.
Naming your home page
The root directory or top level of your site should contain as few files as possible, ideally just your home page and the folders containing all your other files.
Your home page should be named either index.htm/asp/php etc. or default.htm/asp/php etc. The reason for this naming convention is most web servers are configured to fetch particular documents by default.
When you type www.example.com, the server is configured to automatically look for the appropriate files called index or default. This saves the user having to type www.example/index.htm. If the homepage file was named somethingelse.htm, it would not display when www.example.com is entered – either a browser error message would appear, or a directory listing.
Images
It’s best to place all the images for your site in a folder called, wait for it – images. This single location makes it easy to manage your image files, and since some images are often repeated on a site, it is a good deal easier to locate them during the design process and prevents doubling up on the same image.
File naming guidelines
The simple rule of thumb is:
Relevant files should be given relevant names and stored in relevant folders.
File name relevancy
Name your files in a way that relates to the content of the page. Using unrelated or numerical name can make troubleshooting and general maintenance a real headache as you will have no visual cue to remind you of the contents of that page. Relevant filenames can also assist in search engine rankings as search engine algorithms do assign some positive scoring based on the name of the file.
Do not use spaces in file names as this can cause error messages and looks amateurish. To create the illusion of a space, use_the_underscore_key or-dash-key, but use it sparingly; 4 hyphens or underscores maximum. Don’t use other characters such as &,% etc. when naming files.
File name length
There’s no hard and fast rules on this, but think of it from an aesthetics viewpoint. Here’s an example:
tutorial-about-naming-web-site-files.htm
vs
file-naming-tutorial.htm
My recommendation is the second version as it will make the URL shorter, still accurately summarizes what the page is about using important keywords and the URL string is less likely to be broken if sent to someone via email
Naming folders
Apply the same sort of approach when naming your folders. A small business web site might contains folders such as admin, contact, images, product, order and about.
A little bit of forethought on your file base structure and naming conventions will help humans and search engines quickly determine what the page is about, plus cut down the amount of time spent in maintaining your site.
