[Web4lib] reorganizing a web site

[John Fereira]

At 11:33 AM 11/1/2005, 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).

It's been a few years since we did the same thing but I may be able to 
offer some lessons learned.  In our case, not only did some of the 
directories accumulate lots of static html pages, but as content was added 
much of it ended up in the same "section" on the web site (Library Services).



>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.

We essentially did the same thing.  We actually printed off screen shots of 
all of the pages (only the top portion of the page was really needed) and 
then started to reorganize them into piles.  We wanted to end up with six 
major sections for the site which more or less matched the functional areas 
in the library.  Each of those sections may have been broken down in to up 
to 8 or so subsections.

When determining a directory naming scheme a deeper hierarchy with fewer 
files in each directory (even if it's only one index.html page) is much 
easier to maintain.

 From the main home page of the site we wanted to be able to get to any of 
the major sections and all of their subsections.

We used Dreamweaver to create the site.  The main page didn't have a 
template but all of the sections each had a template (with a standard color 
scheme).  That allowed content providers to only deal with a couple of 
dreamweaver templates and each of the sections had it's own "images" 
directory.

If you want to have a look at the final results it is at 
http://www.mannlib.cornell.edu


>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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