| And the
system administrator can move your
website to a different folder, or even a
different computer, without changing its
virtual address. The second problem is that
most people don't know how to write a
relative link. Relative links have the
advantage that you don't need to know the
path to the webpage that you want to link
to, you only need to know where it is
"relative" to the webpage
containing the link.
Designing
Your Directory Structure
The
first step to implementing a website is
to design the directory structure. Let's
design a directory structure for a simple
download website. The website consists
primarily of articles and digital
material that visitors can download. You
could just dump everything at the top
level of the website. Good luck
maintaining that website!
To keep
the files organized, you need to create
sub-directories (folders) on the website.
Even though the website consists only of
articles and digital downloads, you need
five sub-directories, as described below.
- articles
- downloads
- general
- common
- cgi-bin
You
understand what the "articles"
and "downloads" sub-directories
are for, but what are the other three
sub-directories for? It's standard
practice to provide certain features on
your website, as listed below.
- About
- Contact
- FAQ
- Privacy
Policy
- Search
- Sitemap
- User
Agreement
Each of
these features requires a webpage.
Instead of dumping the webpages at the
top level of the website, or mixing them
in with articles or downloads, let's put
them together in a folder named
"general" (I'm sure you can
think of a better name).
All of
your webpages use certain things in
common, for example, your logo graphic.
If your web server provides SSI (Server
Side Includes) all your webpages can
share a common header file and a common
footer file. You might also define all
your website's styles in a common style
sheet. Let's put all of these files in a
folder named "common".
Your
contact page might use an email form. If
your server provides server-side scripts,
you would place the email form script in
a folder named "cgi-bin".
Cgi-bin stands for "Common Gateway
Interface - Binary". Few people use
CGI any more, and those that do don't use
binary files, but the folder name has
stuck as a traditional place to store
scripts. Almost all websites come with a
preconfigured cgi-bin folder, and the
website may be configured so that the
cgi-bin folder is the only folder with
rights to run scripts.
I would
also recommend that you create certain
sub-directories for some of the above
mentioned directories. Most web pages
contain images. You could dump all the
images in the same folder with the
webpages, but when you get more than
about 50 files in a folder, it becomes
difficult to maintain. You should create
an "images" sub-directory in
the articles, downloads, and general
directories. The downloads directory
should also have a "files"
sub-directory to store the downloads.
This
arangement of directories and
sub-directories will provide good file
organization for the example website.
Understanding my reasoning for this
directory structure should help you to
design a directory structure for the
website you have in mind.
Default
Page Configuration
Every
website has at least one default webpage
configured (also called the
"home" page). The default
webpage is the webpage that is returned
when the user enters or clicks on a link
containing only the domain name, without
a specific file name. On a Unix or Linux
web server, the default webpage will
usually be "index.htm". On a
Windows web server (IIS), the default
page will usually be
"default.asp".
The
website administrator, or if your webhost
provides the required "control
panel" feature, you can actually
configure any page to be the default
page. If your web server has more than
one default page configured, I would
recommend removing all but the default
page that you intend to use.
Now,
let's assume that all of your webpages
need to link to an image file named
"logo.gif" stored in the
"common" folder. The relative
link on your default webpage would be as
shown below.
"common/logo.gif"
The
website file manager interprets this as
"look in the folder named common for
the file named logo.gif".
However,
the link on any webpage contained in one
of the sub-directories would be as shown
below.
"../common/logo.gif"
The
website file manager interprets this as
"go up one level, then look down in
the folder named common for the file
named logo.gif".
This
difference in the link may not be a
problem unless you use SSI or ASP (Active
Server Pages) to build your webpages from
a common header file and a common footer
file. Then you need a different link in
the common file depending upon whether
the page linked to the common file is the
default webpage (where you would use
common/filename) or a webpage contained
in a sub-directory (where you would use
../common/filename). There are several
ways to solve this problem.
1. If
your website has a server-side scripting
engine like ASP or PHP and you know how
to program, you could implement code that
selects the proper link.
2. You
could use the complete path, including
the domain name, on all pages. This will
cause problems if you ever have to move
your website to a different web host
(Until all the dns servers across the
planet have been updated).
3. You
could put your home page in a
sub-directory, for example
"common", and make your default
page into a re-direct to your home page.
Then you would use
"../common/filename" for all
links. The following meta tag, placed the
head section of your default webpage,
will immediately redirect the users
browser to your real home page.
meta
http-equiv="refresh"
content="0,url= "http://yourdomain.com/common/homepage.htm"
In this
article, I showed you how to design a
directory structure for your website and
how to create relative links to link all
your webpages together to form a website.
Website visitors don't like to do a lot
of scrolling, so try to keep your
webpages to only two or three screens
high. Please, no more websites that
consist of only one mile long webpage!
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