Website Policies, Standards and Procedures |
Title
| File Organization Standard |
Type
| Standard |
Related Policy | Purpose & Commitment to Quality Policy |
Category
| Web |
Status | Superseded |
Approved | 04/07/2005 |
To Be Reviewed | 04/07/2007 |
Scope
| This standard ensures that the City’s official public website is developed from a user-friendly, citizen-driven perspective. It is aimed at the organization of static content on the City’s servers. |
Standard
| Folder organization
ISD will work cooperatively with departments to create top-level folders for departments/divisions/subject entities that are concise and intuitively named.
The "home page" of the entity must be named index.html and must always be present. The following sub-folder organization and naming must be used within the entity folder, although folders may be omitted if they are empty.
| Folder name | Description |
| images | Folder containing all images |
| pdf | Folder containing all PDF’s |
| scripts | Folder containing extra scripting |
Additional folders and content must be logically organized within the entity folder structure.
URL’s must not be changed without first consulting ISD.
Designers/developers should consider offering a redirect page for URL’s that have changed.
File and folder naming
File and folder names must be intuitive and representative of the content within them. They must consist only of the lowercase letters a-z and the numbers 0-9 in any combination. Special care must be taken to avoid any characters such as spaces, underscores, hyphens, and special characters such as ampersand (‘&’).
Extensions must be used to indicate the type of content. The following table contains approved extensions for popular file types:
| Extension | Description |
| .html | HTML pages. Note that .htm is not acceptable. |
| .js | Javascript |
| .css | Style sheet |
| .gif | Images in GIF89a format |
| .jpg | Images in JPEG format |
| .mpg | Movies in MPEG format |
| .pdf | Files in Portable Document Format |
| .csv | Comma delimited file format |
|
Rationale | Designers and developers should remember that good file keeping:
- Is sensitive to other individuals who may publish to the website in the future.
- Is aware that changing URL’s may have far-reaching consequences to pages (both internally and externally) for pages that link to the resource being changed (e.g. browser bookmarks).
- Will facilitate search and retrieval via search engines.
The structure of file names and folders is essential as deployment of static content then becomes agnostic of the server platform on which it is running.
Consistent file naming also allows processes such as reports and other administrative functions to be easily run without major re-engineering. |