How to structure my HTML files properly?
Solution 1
There is no best practice when i comes to structure it's what ever makes sense to you / easiest to manage. 'Rooting' everything is probably the easiest way at the moment.
That being said what you're trying to accomplish is generically known as 'routing' i.e. resolving resources to 'pretty' URLs. Most server side frameworks can accomplish this by default however as you're writing something static the only way to achieve something similar would be to:
- tweak your .htaccess file
- rely on a javascript framework
Angular has routing as an addon however if you want something more lightweight you could consider reactJS (as demo'd):
Or any of the following (mithril would be another good choice):
Solution 2
you should mange your content in hierarchical directories so that you can keep track of your content. Most of the developer manages there content like this.
/foobar.com
/css
/js
/images
/html
/news
/news_content
fizz.html
buzz.html
news.html
about.html
contact.html
index.html
Solution 3
For the simplicity of your website, I would say Ex. 1 would work for you. If you start adding more complexity and more pages, an arrangement like Ex. 3 would be better.
To answer the latter part of your question, I would turn news.html into index.html under the news directory in Ex. 3, just to keep things more organized. If you navigate to the news directory without an index file, you will most likely get a forbidden message or give access to that folder.
Comments
-
MetalEscape almost 2 years
For a basic static website, with a few pages and sub-pages, I'm kind of confused on best practices for directory structure for the HTML pages.
Say I have a simple website like this:
An index (home) page, about, contact, and news page. On the news page, there are two links to two sub-pages of the news page, fizz.html, and buzz.htmlIs it best to have all HTML pages in the same root directory folder like below?
Ex. 1
/foobar.com /css /js index.html about.html contact.html news.html fizz.html buzz.html
Or it best to have all sub-pages in a separate directory folder like this?
Ex. 2
/foobar.com /css /js index.html about.html contact.html news.html /news fizz.html buzz.html
Or is it best to have any pages with sub-pages all in it's own folder like this?
Ex. 3
/foobar.com /css /js index.html about.html contact.html /news news.html (maybe named index.html?) fizz.html buzz.html
If the method in Ex. 3 is the best way to organize, would you want to leave news.html as-is, or change its name to index.html? In the case of the latter, is it bad to have multiple html files named index? Are there any SEO issues caused by this too?
I currently have my test website structured per Ex. 2, which causes a problem, for example: if the user were at www.foobar.com/news/fizz.html, and they want to go back to the News page, if they happen to erase "fizz.html" from the URL, it doesn't work.
So I'm guessing Ex. 3 is the correct way to structure a website? I'm a bit confused here.