Regardless of the size of the project, it is important to have a good organizational plan to make it easier to work with the project. As they say, failing to plan is planning to fail.
It is important to understand how your files will be organized both logically as well as physically. Additionally, if you will be developing multiple websites, whether personally, professionally, or for a class, it makes since to organize your information.
There are a few things to know before you start organizing your information. Do you plan to use relative or absolute links? Will you host the files on a server, or just use them as local files (because it’s a school project)? What type of server are you planning on using – Unix or Windows? Will you use a dynamic language?
Designing for your Audience
From a design perspective, you need to know who your intended audience is. And what do you wish for them to do? This doesn’t necessarily change how your pages will look, although it can, but it does affect what you decide to put onto your pages?
Think about, for example, a website for a political candidate. What would the website’s purpose(s) be? To sway undecided voters toward you? Get people who already like you to donate to your campaign? Keep people from voting for your opposition?
You can have more than a single goal for a website, but rarely for a single page. And even then, sometimes a website needs a singular purpose.
Managing Multiple Sites
In a given web class, you might deal with only a few web projects that you need to keep track of. However, this can lure you into complacency which can be harder to break, and even necessary when you work on dozens or more sites.
As a freelance web developer, I’ve worked on many websites over the years. At one time I calculated that I had the source files for over 70 web projects. Some were minor modifications I was asked to make for a site, others were complete websites I built from scratch.
Despite having dozens of active website projects, it was still fairly easy to manage because of how I organized my files. I have a folder for all of my website project. Then each project gets it’s own sub-folder under my website’s folder.
NOTE: As the number of websites I managed grew, I opted to modify this slightly. I now have an active and inactive folder. Folders for web sites I’m actively working on or were recently working on go in the active folder, all others go into the inactive folder, to make it easier to find the web project I’m working on.
To contrast this, I’ve taught web design and web programming for over a dozen years, and I routinely see students have issues finding files, keeping track of active projects, duplicating projects, and more. And that’s with them only having a few projects for a class or two that they have to keep track of. They’ll have some websites and files on a thumb drive, others will be on their desktop, while others under their documents folder.
I also had one extra folder. It was a quick reference folder that had components that I frequently used in web projects. This way I could find things like form handlers, email scripts, etc. and incorporate them into projects, instead of having to search for projects where I used them previously. As you work and build more, and more complex, websites, you may find yourself repeating several tasks, and being able to access work you’ve already done will save you a lot of time.
To contrast this organization method I’ve used, I’ve taught web design and web programming for over a dozen years, and I routinely see students have issues finding files, keeping track of active projects, duplicating projects, and more. And that’s with them only having a few projects for a class or two that they have to keep track of. They’ll have some websites and files on a thumb drive, others will be on their desktop, while others under their documents folder.
Building & Managing Website Projects was originally found on Access 2 Learn
