Your Web Site and Things Not Mentioned In Any book

If this is so important why isn’t it in a book? Well, my friend, because it is assumed that you already know it, or instructors don’t think it’s intellectual enough to teach. What is this?

It’s how to name your files and why
It’s how to name your folders
It’s how to set up your folders on your development machine so that when copied to the server your website works

Let’s Do This

You’re going to make a website. What you want to do is eliminate as much confusion and repetitive checking of what you’ve done. So, let’s start with the names of your files. Use lower case when you name your files and keep the names as short as possible. Here’s why: when you must refer to these files in links, a menu, as a graphic those files names must be spelled exactly.

On your development you can do all sorts of things that will result in a working website, but your site man not work at all when you upload it to the server. That’s because when you refer to files on your development machine that path may not exist on the server.

Here’s an example: you have a graphic file in the folder c:\camping trip\flower.jpg. And you put that path into the graphic tag like this:

&ltimg src=flower.jpg&gt this only works when the flower is in the folder where the file calling it is locatd

and the picture of the flower appears in your web site. Goo you think. Wrong. When you upload your site you won’t be uploading the folder campingtrip and that image will not appear in your website.

To get around this all you need to do is set up your file structure like this:

See what we’ve done? Now you have a folder for pictures. It’s pix in lower case. You have a folder for your css style files. It’s called css. and you have a folder for your PDF files. It’s called pdf. the reason all names and folders are in lower case is this: to access them you must spell them specifically as they are created on a Linux server. And, believe me, either of them is far better than a windows server

Should you spell your pix folder PiX and then try to access a file in it with pix. It may well fail. You see, on a Linux server upper and lower case letters are treated as separate characters. Windows operating systems don’t do that. Now you see what I meant when I said things may work on your development machine but not on your server.

My apologies to you folks in the Apple environment as I’m not an Apple person and don’t know how they would respond to this sort of thing.

I’ve never seen this in any book on the web, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Not anywhere. but that’s okay because now you know. How did I learn this? The hard way. And, yes, I wish someone told me. Would have saved a lot of rework.

Be well, my friend. Best of luck. Please feel free to add your comments below. I’d love to hear from you. All responsible comments are answered and published. What else would you like to see here? Let me know?

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