[Web4lib] reorganizing a web site

[Thomas Dowling]

Obligatory reference to <http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI>, and a
reminder that you can't expect all users to start at your home page and
follow links from there.

Arrange your files however it makes sense for you, but don't leave your
users staring at "Page Not Found".  If you really really have to change
the URL, use some technique that provides a 301 (permanent redirect)
header - not an http-equiv tag in an HTML page.

In general, your users don't care if your file hierarchy is very
vertical, very flat, or nearly nonsensical.  A few will prefer it if the
URLs have understandable names - hours.html rather than page3752.cfm or
whatever, but that's about it.  They do care if they start getting 404
errors. They also care about the logical navigational structures on your
site. But there's nothing that says a breadcrumb trail of "About ->
Hours -> Thanksgiving Holiday Hours" has to reflect a directory
structure of /about/hours/txgiving.html.


Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu



Kathy Gaynor wrote:
> We are in the midst of a complete redesign and want to use this
> opportunity to reorganize our library's web site
> (<http://library.webster.edu>).  We started many years ago as a web site
> with a handful of pages that we threw into the root directory.  We have
> made subdirectories as needed over the years in a somewhat haphazard
> fashion (gee, the root directory is getting pretty long, let's move some
> stuff out of there).
> 
> So far we have looked at our content and have done a rough inventory. 
> We have assigned working names to groups of similar files (e.g.
> "Facility Information", "Instructional Materials", etc.).  These are
> rather broad categories to my mind.
> 
> So here are my questions:
> 
> 1. How have you gone about organizing the files on your server?  Do you
> put everything under a subdirectory (e.g. ../facility/hours.html)?  Or
> are some things left in the root directory (e.g. ../hours.html)?
> 
> 2. How narrow do you make your subdirectories (categories)?
> 
> Any advice, war stories, etc. that you could offer related to this topic
> would be much appreciated.
> 
> 
> Kathy M. Gaynor, Reference Librarian       
> Emerson Library
> Webster University               
> 470 E. Lockwood Ave.           
> St. Louis, MO  63119
> (314) 961-2660 x7811
> (314) 968-7113 fax
> kgaynor at webster.edu
> 
> 
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