Naming Your Web Files and Folders

General Information
Policies and Guidelines
File Naming
How to Post
Special Issues with FTP
Determining Your URL
Limit Access to Pages
Announce Your Pages
Maintaining Your Pages
FAQ

Creating Web Pages--Faculty

Naming Folders and Files

Web pages create links by referencing the name and location of other files. Thus, clear and consistent filenames are critical to a well executed and easily maintained site. Some file names are illegal; these will prevent your page from displaying properly. Also, files on the web server are case sensitive, so you must be careful to maintain consistent use of capitalization when creating, updating or linking to other files.

Rules For Naming Files and Folders.

Here are some general tips for selecting filenames for Web pages.

• Watch your use of capitalization. Our web server is case sensitive. Be very careful if you use capital letters in your file names, especially when updating those files or linking to them. If you use FTP to post your files to the web server (only recommended when off-campus without access to our dial-up server or VPN), you can end up with several identically named files--except for differences in capitalization.
• Use only lower case letters, numbers, and underscores in file names. We recommend only using lower case alphanumeric characters (a-z, 1-9, the underscore (_) and the period (.) symbol), to avoid problems that can arise, especially when using FTP to post your files to the web server. This will avoid use of illegal characters such as "@", "#", "/", "\", "%" and most other such special characters. Do not use spaces.
• Use correct file extensions. The extension is the part of a filename after the period. Below is a table showing the required extensions for the most common file types.
  

  .html or .htm	Standard HTML web pages
  .gif	Graphics in a GIF format
  .jpg or .jpeg	Graphics in a JPEG format
  .pdf	PDF formatted document

• Keep file names short. URLs can get confusing (or more confusing) when they are very long. It helps if you can keep your file and folder names around 15 characters or less.
• Use exactly the same name when updating files that already exist. If you replace files on the web server by overwriting them with the updated information, any links to those files will continue to work, displaying the new updated pages automatically.

Your Departmental Folder

Each department has its own folder on the College web server. This folder will contain all the files and subfolders that comprise your department's web site. Your departmental web manager, or your ACC liaison, can help you locate this folder.

Special File Names on the College Server

The following file names will be served by default if you do not include them in your URL.

• welcome.html (preferred)
• welcome.htm
• home.html
• home.htm
• index.html
• index.htm

See the section on Determining Your URL for more information on how and why you may wish to use these files names.

Suggested Naming conventions for Haverford Academic Departments

In addition to technical rules for naming files and folders, ACC suggests using some naming conventions. These will help you organize your files, and keep file structures consistent across departments. File names are important, not only because they help you keep track of your file content, but they are part of the name your readers can use to look at a particular web page. If your department already has a naming convention, use it.

Using folders to organize your HTML files helps you organize and quickly find and identify files relating to different types of information, such as different classes or faculty members. If you just have a half dozen basic files, this does not seem so important. However, as your folder grows larger, you will find that it gets confusing. On the other hand, a huge number of folders can also be confusing, especially if each folder contains only a few files. Although the internal structure of your site will not effect those browsing through it, it does make it difficult to maintain--especially if several people work on the site together. Thus, you want to create a folder structure that will clearly group similar types of information, without over compartmentalizing files.

Academic Computing recommends the following file and folder naming conventions for posting new information on Haverford Web site. Please check with your departments Web coordinator to find out what, if any, naming conventions your department is already using. If your department has decided upon different conventions, please use those.

(recommended unless your department has set up different conventions)

• Department home page is named welcome.html
  (welcome.html is the default page name on our server)
  
• A sub-folder called faculty exists for faculty pages
  • A file called faculty.html is in the faculty folder.
    This file has a list of faculty in the department, with links to appropriate faculty home pages.
  • Each faculty with a home page, or other non-course information has a sub folder inside the faculty folder, named the same as his or her username
    (where username is the email name of the faculty, e.g. jdoe)
    • Faculty home pages are inside their folder and named username.html
      (where username is the email name of the faculty, e.g. jdoe.html)
  • A sub-folder called courses exists for course pages
    • A file called course.html is in the courses folder.
      This file has a list of course offered in the department, with links to appropriate course home pages.
    • Each course with a home page has a sub folder inside the faculty folder, named the same as his or her course_name
      (where course_name is the catalog name of the course, e.g. math101)
      • Course home pages are inside their folder and named course_name.html
        (where course_name is the catalog name of the course, e.g. math101.html