Naming Files and Creating URLs

Before you being designing a web page you should understand how the naming and organizing of files and folders affects the URL for that page. Below are some guidelines to help you with the process.

• Files and folders should be made up of only the standard set of characters A-Z and/or number 0-9 with the exception of:
  • - (dash)
  • _ (underscore)
• Files and folders should not contain any spaces, or special characters such as, #, &, ^
• Files and folders should be kept to a reasonable length of characters. The longer the name the longer the URL and it is best to keep it short.
• The main (first) page in your site should be named index.htm, index.html, index.asp, home.htm, home.html, or home.asp. This allows you to drop the file name when giving out the URL.  For example: http://www.uwgb.edu/index.asp is the same as http://www.uwgb.edu/

Organizing files and folders is important.  A web site that has a logical structure to the files and folders is much easier to maintain, make additions to, and creates logical URLs.  The following are a few recommendations for organizing files and folders.

• Related files should be grouped together in a folder.  For example an instructor has a web site and within this site there are pages for three courses that he teaches.  It would be best to create a folder for each class and put the files that belong to that class in that folder.
• Images should be grouped together in one folder.  This eliminates the need to have duplicate images throughout your site