Question

Why is it important to organize folders for a Web site? Describe a good folder structure for your project. Provide an example of a link using a relative file address and an example of a link using an absolute file address. Explain why you might choose a relative link over an absolute link.

Answer 1

Hi shiva,

It's important to organize folders for a website because of the following reasons (among many more):

1. You probably won't be the one maintaining the website forever. The person following you up will need a clean & easily navigable folder structure so as to not spend hours figuring out how everything is connected.

2. For my folder structure, I tend to use the following folders (in a PHP project).
- assets
- css
- images
- scripts
- includes
- footer.php
- header.php
- sidebar.php

The assets folder contains all my CSS, images, and JavaScript files. The includes folder contains portions of the site I can "include" into main pages. That way, I don't have to make a change in many places...only one.

3. The reason you'd choose relative over absolute is portability. If you decide to move your site from http://yoursite1.com to http://yoursite2.com, with relative links nothing needs to change. On the other hand, with absolute links...you may have hundreds or even thousands of places you need to make changes at. Scary, huh?