easy for visitors to follow. Chapter 3: Planning and Maintaining a Web Site 75 What you see The second side to managing your Web site structure happens behind the scenes (where your users cant see the information, but you want some kind of organizational system to remember whats what). Before you get too far into building your site with Dreamweaver, spend some time thinking about the management issues involved in keeping track of all the files you create for your site. Files are all the images, HTML pages, animations, sound files, and anything else you put in your Web site. Once your Web site grows past a handful of pages, organizing them in separate folders or directories is best. Many Web developers get 20 or 30 pages into a growing Web site and then realize that having all their files in one folder is confusing. To make matters worse, if you start moving things into new folders, you have to change all the links. Not realizing this, some people start organizing files outside of Dreamweaver, only to discover that they have broken links. Fortunately, Dreamweaver includes sitemanagement tools that automatically adjust links when you move pages or create new folders from within the Files panel. Still, starting out with a good plan is better than having to clean up the structure later. Before you build those first few pages, think about where youre likely to add content in the future (you always will!). For example, you may start with one page that lists all your staff; but after they see how cool it is, staff members may want to develop their own pages. In that case, you may want a separate folder dedicated to staff pages. Similarly, if you provide information for a sales team or create an online catalog, you may want a separate folder for each product. As you add new sections, such as the staff or product pages I mention here, its a good practice to create new subfolders to store their respective files. Creating subfolders also makes managing a site thats built by multiple people easier. If each subsection has a separate folder, then each developer can better manage his or her own files. Naming your sites files As you create files and folders, you have to name them; and the more consistent you are about those names, the easier it is for you and anyone else working on your site to keep track of whats in them as the site grows. For example, say your Web site is a newsletter that includes articles about the happenings in your town. Simple names like fire.html and truck.html may make sense to you this week because youre familiar with the top stories. But six months from now, if you look for that article on the six-car-pileup that happened on Main Street, you may not remember that you called it 76 Part II: Looking Like a Million (Even on a Budget) truck.html. Adding dates to the end of filenames can help you identify the files that you may need months - or even years - down the road. Remember that you cant use spaces, but you can use the underscore. A good filename may be fire2006_08_12.html or truck2006_08_19.html; using dates helps you remember that you added these articles in August of 2006. Another option is to create a folder for each new update and name it with a date. For example, a folder named stories2006_08 can contain all the stories from the August 2006 issue. Then you can put truck.html and any other stories from that issue in the stories2006_08 folder, and you can find them by date as well as by filename. As you develop a filenaming system, talk to other people who may work on