file management

[Stephen Bawa]

I've recently updated some of my coursework online using Dreamweaver. Before I uploaded, I organised my images, logos and web pages into separate folders - unfortunately, this caused all elements within my pages to disappear. I ended up having to take everything out of the folders to restore it. :(

[Stephen Bawa]

what I failed to say above was "can anyone help me with folders?" I can't just have my files in one big folder after all.

[James]

Steve, I can't access your website for some reason so I can't see what the problem is.

It sounds like that by moving the images around you have broken all the links to them within the site. Your HTML page will be looking for images in their original locations and can't find them.

The safest way to do this is to use Dreamweaver's file view to move files and create new folders - Dreamweaver will then update the links automatically for you (but only if you have "defined your site" in Dreamweaver first).

Once your site is back online I'll have a look for you,

Cheers

[francis]

Hi

Can you put everything back up online for me and post the address of the relevant page on the forum - at the moment there's nothing there. If I can see the source code, it will help try and see what's happening.

You can have everything in one file. Think of a web site's directory structure like that of Windows - you can have one folder inside another one inside another one.

One thing that might be happening is that David changed server types (http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/forum/index.php?v=stopic&c=76) over Christmas from Windows to Linux. Linux servers are case sensitive, so MYFILE.html is treated as a separate file from MyFile.html and MYFILE.HTML.

Bung it up and we'll have a look

[David]

Stephen - I just checked your files by FTP. Your index.html file is missing from your folder and that's why we can't link to your site.

What I see in the bawa/ folder are two other folders, one named "Green Farm" and one named "website". You also have a colourpage.htm file and a ppt file.

For some reason your index.html file has been moved into the "Green Farm" folder. Otherwise, the content of these two folders is the same.

What I suggest you do now is create a simple index.html file in Dreamweaver. Add links to pages/sites you want us to look at to this new index.html file and upload to your bawa/ folder on websitearchitecture.co.uk and then we can see your problem and sort you out. It may be easier if you make your links absolute (http://www...) rather than relative. This will make life easier for you in the short term.

Longer term we can have a session on file management and Dreamweaver site definitions if you think it would help.

[francis]

Hi Stephen

It might also help if you understand the following point. Webservers always look out for certain files in web directories. These are generally called "index" or "default". The extension will usually be .htm or .html, although the server can be configured to accept whatever extensions the webmaster wants (.php, .asp, .cfm, .xml etc etc). If you code a link like:

http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/bawa/

that doesn't specify a page to go to (as David has done), the server will look for one of these default files. If it doesn't find one, the server won't send any HTML back to the browser other than a "you are not authorized to view this page" page (or if the server is poorly configured you'll see a listing of everything in that directory).

Coding links like this is actually a good idea as it allows much more flexability when administering a large site. Consider the following:

Page 1: contains the following link: http://example.com/index.html which links to page 2 (index.html). If I change page 2 to index.php, I also need to change the link to it that's on page 1. By coding the link as http://www.example.com/ the server will look for a page called index and load it. Less work for me!

[Stephen Bawa]

thanks fellas - will get on to it today and keep you posted on my success