Organizing Your FTP Space

Once you decide to have a multipage site, you should start thinking about organizing your FTP directory (to make expanding and revising your site easier). Organizing an FTP directory is just like organizing folders on a computer; you create subdirectories (also called folders) within your main directory. One way to organize is to place your homepage document (index.html) and its associated graphics files in the main directory and then create and name new subdirectories for the other sections of your site.

Using our example from the previous section, bLink could have created separate subdirectories called "origin" and "job" in the main directory that also contains all his homepage files. Each subdirectory would contain all the files appearing in the corresponding subpage section.

You create new subdirectories with your FTP program. Using Fetch on a Mac, you'd go to the Directories menu and select Create New Directory. Windows users with WS_FTP should look for the MkDir button on the right-hand panel (labeled Remote System) and click that button to create a subdirectory.

Remember to change the links on your pages so that they point to the documents you moved to new subdirectories. Our links would change to <A HREF="origin/index.html">My Origin</A> and <A HREF="job/index.html">My Job</A>.

The first link in this example tells us that there is a document called index.html (the main page of the section) in a subdirectory called "origin." Always use a forward slash (/) to separate the subdirectory from documents within the subdirectory. If we had another document in the origin subdirectory named anotherpage.html, we would link to it like this: <A HREF="origin/anotherpage.html">. The same rules apply when we create the "job" subdirectory.

Now a link to return to the homepage, located in a "higher" directory (our main directory), looks like this: <A HREF="../index.html">Back to the Homepage</A>.

Notice the .../ that we added here. It tells the browser to move up one directory in the hierarchy before looking for the document index.html. Without the .../ the browser would look for index.html in the subdirectory containing the page with the link we are clicking on.

Some basic planning and organization will help your audience get the most out of your Web site and will also make it a lot easier for you to add to your site in the future.