Very basic website directory questions

[MikeT]

I dont know html and dont think I want to get too involved with it either, I just want to be able to set up and update/add pages to a very basic site when I feel the need without going through hoops each time I do so.

I downloaded this http://www.pablosoftwaresolutions.com/html/wysiwyg_web_builder.html

I have been using it as it seems quite easy to work with but after just a few pages I seem to be getting in a muddle with where I store files on my webspace.

I have a folder for the wysiwyg site, in that main folder I have the mainpage.html (index page) and its photo's (jpg) I also have navigation buttons which are individual bmp files. I then added some more pages and they too have nav buttons linking back to the main or any other page on the site.

Trouble is that after just a few pages I have lots of files and its getting quite confusing when I want to update or change anything.

What is the normal folder/file structure used?

I already have what I consider a very long url to put in any links and its getting tiresome to alter them as they dont fit in drop down boxes when I'm editing without scrolling right to see the actual file name I want to link to if you get my drift.

Oh the site is at www.thecside.co.uk

Thanks and dont laugh outloud! its not meant to be flash, just easy to use. My 2 kids have to be able to work on it too, but they will sooon be better at it than me

 

[Ian]

I see what you mean, the URLs do seem quite long! The main reason for that is because you are using your pipex webspace which means you have that long directory structure - you could e-mail and ask if you can use that space for domain hosting, as it would allow you do have the URLs use your main domain in the page names. That would massively reduce the URL length

Usual directory structures are just:

index.htm ->main page
/images/ ->directory for all site images
/photos/ ->example for photo section
/kids/ -> etc...
/dell/ -> etc...

You would be able to point people to http://www.thecside.co.uk/photos if you had a domain host, rather than http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/pro...aoow77/newsite-wysiwyg/pictures/Picpage2.html

 

[MikeT]

Thanks for the info Ian

I had a look in my Pipex control panel and it seems that I am able to use any alias that I set for email in my web page address so now I have www.MikeT.dsl.pipex.com as my url!

The reason I couldnt use index.html before was that I had a page with that name already there that I did in front page express in 2002 and didnt want to delete it in case I didnt like this wysiwyg builder.

So everything will now be much easier to manage with such a short url

Told you I didnt know what I was doing didnt I

 

[Ian]

That new URL is pretty good

 

[MikeT]

Well its all working again but it took just too long to do as I got well and truly stuck at one or more points.

I ended up with this for a file structure.

index.html---main page

/kidspage/kidspage .html

/dell/dell.html

/photo/photo.html

/files/with files in...

The idea was that the folders kept everything in order so I knew what was where, this worked fine untill I got to the navigation button url's in the photo folder.
Whatever I did with the urls to point out of there to the other pages I always ended up with this /photo/kidspage.html or
/photo/dell.html showing in the browser, just couldnt get rid of that leading photo.

index was ok as I used my main url to nav out of the photo folder, but with the others I gave up and had to put the dell and kidspage html files plus the assorted other files they needed in the photo folder which defeated the object of seperation in the first place.

What did I do wrong?

 

[Ian]

If you rename /kidspage/kidspage.html to /kidspage/index.html you'll be able to access it by just typing in /kidspage/

Relative directory structures take a while to get used to, but if you put the location of the button link to "/photo/photo.html" exactly like that it should work... if not you may need to edit the file manually or use the full url as the link.

 

[MikeT]

Thanks Ian, I will take a look tomorrow, its made my head swim a bit today.

I would have replied earlier but "both" sites were very slow to respond for me.

 

[MikeT]

Ian, I found this which really helped me with the index bit, I didnt really understand on first reading what you meant would happen with renaming kidspage.html. I just didnt realise you could have more than one index.html. Told you I was basic!

http://webtips.dan.info/subdir.html scroll down to Default Index Files

I would have copied the paragraph over to here but as its copyrighted I didnt want to risk it

Cheers

Mike.

 

[Ian]

Thats a good page! Pretty much explains it all