organizing a website, an exercise in sanity (backend web development)
What we do is website design all day long. We have folders and folders of web design clients all over our hard drives and then some. But the real task is developing our own online presense, since I really don’t care how messy my client sites have become after they uploaded thousands of web images and thousands of files on top of the nice clean work that we did of sorting it all out.
So as the old adage goes, “What’s a mother to do”. Well first of all, we use mozilla tabs to organize groups of sites into a nice compact little manner so that we can open all tabs and go at it. Then we organize them in some manner and fashion that seems logical. We’ve placed our little group tabs all over the place in bookmarks where they below. Our websites have never looked so organized… right? Well, not exactly. Behind the fame and glory of a nice site is a backend that is still cluttered with folders and files. We have sub folders for each design phase, like mockup1, mockup2, etc. But our mockups are not the least of our worries. We need to store a backup on each of our sites because our web design customers often overwrite our design work and mess up their sites. So we have site backups too.
The thing to remember in web design and development is to have small names and nice places to put things.
Every folder for each client has an image directory, it’s just called images. Then there are other folder like style sheets under css. Then we have an ebay folder for our ebay design customers and we have a docs folder and a server folder and so on and so forth.
Organizing a website can be a daunting task, but don’t despair. Any good webdesigner will automatically do it for you, and if they don’t watch out.