Website Design Considerations
Website Structure
Sooner or later you will have to think about how your webpage will be stored within the website filesystem, how will you divide up the pages and where you will put them...
At first glance this is simple enough, all you really need is an index page, and the various other pages can be grouped together in sub-directories according to their subject matter.
This is a fairly standard way to go about things, the majority of websites are laid out in this way. What you really need to consider is how easy this will be to maintain and whether or not the site will change in the future and if so how your structure will assist or hinder this.
Considerations here are the structural complexity, (ie multiple directories each with just a few pages in them) and links between these pages which will require the necessary path information.
The simplest layout is to drop every page into the same directory, that way paths cease to be an issue. This is a good method when your site is very small with only a handful of pages but as it gets larger it also gets more cumbersome.
Many websites that have distinct sections according to subject or function will often have slight differences between the pages of one section and another. Once the site has grown to this scale it is usually advisable to group the self similar pages together into separate sections of the website, this of course equates to separate sub-directories as the underlying HTML files usually share the same characteristics and differences. Thus the files too should be grouped according to their self-similar features, which invariably translates to sets of self-similar pages within different sections of a website.
The site structure is a key feature to get right the first time, once a site has become established and development work is well underway this can be a very awkward and sometimes prohibitively difficult aspect to change.
Some thought should also be given to the naming and designation of these sections, if your schema is a good one the path should always suggest itself to you when adding links to a page in another section, it should be as intuitive as possible. If you keep getting confused and having to look up paths the odds are that your structure is flawed or at least sub-optimal!