By Sandy Drake
NNFP Website HELP Team Member
Imagine you hired a company to build you a beautiful new home. From the outside your new home looks lovely, but you realize on opening the front door that none of the interior doors are installed but leaning against the wall in the main living room. Instead of moving into your new home, you’re stuck finishing the task that the construction company neglected to finish. Unfortunately, too many people are faced with the same sort of frustration when they take a look at the back end of their new websites.
Unorganized Website
From the start of my very first web development course and throughout my web education, the instructors could not emphasize more the importance of good file structure and organization. They explained that most but not all new websites start out small, with just a few pages, a handful of images and probably one style sheet. As the business grows and time passes, new needs bring on more pages. Images and pages become outdated and updated. The site owner may bring in a programmer; add a database or PayPal and shopping cart options. With a database, newsletters can be sent out and member or client information can be stored and accessed in order to make the business run more smoothly. The root level is now overloaded and cluttered with current information, information to be used in the future and outdated information too important to discard. Original images, alternately sized images for different purposes and outdated images, along with informational documents, pdfs and programming criteria, mix together with no apparent order and fill the root level of the site. Your website is a mess, and it happens much faster than you would expect.
Now you bring in a web developer or find time in your busy schedule to update your site, fix broken links or to try to access past information to be reintroduced on the site. Where do you begin to look? The whole process seems overwhelming.
It is the web developer’s job, in the beginning, to set up a file structure and organize the information for the current and future needs of your site. It is a simple process to initiate and can cause the biggest problems if not implemented. Even a simple file structure can prevent confusion and sometimes large costly mistakes.
Organized Website
This simple file structure can comprise of as little as seven folders, labeled with easily understandable names. I would suggest a CSS folder, an Images folder, a CompanyInformation folder, an ImagesInProcess folder, a Templates folder, a Docs folder and an Archive folder to hold backup copies of current pages as well as outdated images and outdated pages of information. The only loose pages on the root level should be the index page and sometimes some programming information.
Next, a good web developer should educate the client on how to manage, maintain and update their file structure as the website matures.
I am still shocked to see how many websites, constructed by intelligent individuals, have been released as complete, even though one of the most basic and important areas in the infrastructure of the website has been neglected.
We would hope that a construction company, after finishing a building, would clean up loose and discarded nails, pieces of wood, sawdust and any other left over trash before presenting the building as complete. The web developer has the same responsibility. The backend area of the website should be clean and organized, free of miscellaneous pages, word documents and images, before the developer’s job is considered finished.
The correctly completed website should be user friendly on the inside as well as the outside.