Simple Website Maintenance

Article by Steve Watkins

Introduction

Making and maintaining a very small and simple website is a very simple process. Making and maintaining a large and successful one is not. In this article I will explain a few of the basic tips and tricks that professional web developers use to keep their sites easy to update and error free.

While on most small sites these hints will not usually save you much time, even if your site grows to more than ten pages you will be glad you followed a set page naming structure.

Keeping these suggestions in mind when first developing your site is vital. Ignore them now and it will cost you in maintenance time later.

Capitalisation of page and image names

The key when naming both your page file names and image file names is consistency. Use a regular scheme like always making your file names lower-case, or upper-case, but never a mixture between the two.

This is especially important on a Linux based website hosting server like us. Unlike Windows, Linux is case sensitive. While your Windows computer might show your pages correctly when you link using different capitalisation, when you upload your site you will have errors.

Having a fairly simple naming convention like "always keep file names lower case" can save you significant amounts of time when you search for the reason why your images are not displaying correctly on your site. The same applies when looking for why one page doesn't link correctly to another.

Separating words in a filename

While wherever possible it is best to keep the filenames of your pages and images to one word, sometimes for their easy identification two or three words is necessary. In this case, developers are well advised to use a multiple-word naming convention as well.

While you could use spaces between the words, this can be another major source of errors appearing. The reason why using spaces is not recommended is that many programs you and your visitors use do not handle them properly. The files may appear as missing because of the spaces.

Instead of spaces you have a few other options for a file you would have named "page name.html":

• No Spaces - You could name file pagename.html, but this could be a little confusing without something clearly separating the two words.
• Underscores - You could name the file page_name.html, which is a good style.
• Hyphens - You could name the page page-name.html, which also has the benefit of search engines being able to separate the words. The search engines may rank you slightly higher with this naming method.

Avoiding file overload with structured directories

While following an established file naming convention will have removed many of the potential errors for your site, to make maintenance as easy as possible files should be stored in directories.

Once again, you could place every page and image in one big collection in your public_html directory. The problem with this method is that once your site grows you may find your files here more than can be easily managed.

It is much smarter to use separate directories for each of your pages depending on their content. For example, with our site, we currently have more than eighty FAQ pages, and several pages simply listing which questions each of these pages covers.

Instead of having every one of these in the public_html directory, we have created a "FAQ" sub-directory below the public_html one. We place our pages with lists of FAQs here. Below the FAQ directory we use "answers" for the actual FAQ answer pages themselves.

While this is a fairly simple example of having a directory structure, as you add more pages it will help considerably in keeping your site organisation clean and clear.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, your file naming conventions and directory structure is a personal preference that should be customised to your particular site and developers. No matter which you actually implement, keeping things consistent will save you time and help reduce errors over the long term.

See further general website hosting FAQs or our FAQ categories for more information.

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