Designing Your Website's Directory Structure
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Any kid, and their grandmother too, can make a webpage. There are many "wysiwyg" webpage design applications that let you create a webpage as easy as typing text.But only a few people can create a WEBSITE. The stumbling block is knowing how to link webpages together to form a website. I have seen many websites that consist of a single webpage - about a mile long!
The first problem is that websites are contained in virtual directories. You know that your webpages can be found at yourdomain.com, but the actual path to yourdomain.com on the web server may be known only by the system administrator. 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
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