Directories

This section of the HTML guide deals with structuring your work. When you create a homepage, you are organizing data in two directories - the local directory on your hard drive and the remote directory where you will be uploading your documents. Having copies of all of your html documents on your local directory serves two purposes:

1) As a backup of all of your work in the event that your remote server crashes.
2) Allows you to work offline while updating your homepage which can, in some cases, save you costly connection charges.

Creating Directories

How you choose to organize your directories is up to you and the following sections are intended as suggestions only. It is wise to create a central directory (called a folder in Windows) to contain all of the data in your homepage documents, and eventually, your subdirectories. The ideal place to store your homepage directory is in your "Internet" directory. I am using my file setup in all examples here, yours may be different.

Internet Directory

If one does not already exist, open a new directory called "internet". Mine is located on my C:\ drive and looks like this:

(c:\internet).
This directory should contain all of the programs, files and subdirectories relating to the Internet.

Homepage Directory

In your c:\internet directory, create a subdirectory called "homepage". This is where you will store all documents, files and subdirectories related to your homepage. It will look like this:

(c:\internet\homepage).

Subdirectories

In your c:\internet\homepage directory, you will soon be creating subdirectories to organize the large amount of data contained in your homepage. An example of this would be subdirectories containing your graphics and/or your midi files. These files would look like this:

(c:\internet\homepage\graphics)
(c:\internet\homepage\midi)

Eventually you may even want to expand one or more of these subdirectories to include a breakdown of your graphic files. For example:

(c:\internet\homepage\graphics\backgrounds\ ) or
(c:\internet\homepage\graphics\icons) or
(c:\internet\homepage\graphics\lines) etc...

Unless your webspace provider allows for remote server subdirectories, it is wise to keep these subdirectories to a minimum. You will need to type a path to your file locations when formatting your html documents. For example, if you wish to insert an icon into your page, you would need to enter the following large tag:

< img src="graphics/icons/icon.jpg" >

If, however, you store all of your images in your graphics subdirectory, your tag will be much less complicated as follows:

< img src="graphics/icons.jpg" >

All of the information dealt with thus far on file structure relates to organizing your work on your own local computer. The reason is that not all webspace providers allow you to create subdirectories on their remote servers. This can lead to a lot of clutter on the remote server when your uploaded data includes graphics, midi files, html documents and text files etc.

Geocities and many of the larger webspace providers do not include provisions for remote subdirectories with their basic free homepage programs, but do offer enhanced access programs that include this option. Most of the larger, corporate Internet Service Providers will offer you this option with their enhanced access accounts only. More often than not, small and medium-sized local ISPs will allow for remote access subdirectories as part of a complete Internet package. My advise to you would be to shop around and read all of the fine print when selecting an ISP.

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