File and Directory Naming Conventions

While Personal and Organization homepages are stored in individual accounts, University and Department pages are stored in the directory /www/docs/. Subdirectories of that directory contain the files that make up our Web server, such as the following:

academics/ - contains the pages of all acadmic programs and departments

offices/ - contains the pages of individual administrative offices

publications/ - contains various publications of WPI, including the Undergraduate and Graduate Catalogs, located in separate subdirectories.

news/ - contains news releases and other news publications published by WPI

campus/ - contains pages pertaining to campus life

about/ - contains information about WPI, awards, and other relevant information

media/ - contains pages relevant to the news media

Images/ - contains all the images for the WPI Web site.

Images/CMS - contains all the assets used in the CMS. These include images but may also be PDFs, Word files, or other common files.

Images/Templates - contains the images which make up the templates for all sites.

On the WPI webserver:

directory names are all lower case
filenames (e.g., index.html) contain only lowercase letters
all HTML files end in .html (not .htm)
file and directory names CANNOT contain any spaces or underscores (_)
filenames should be kept brief and not overly descriptive in an effort to keep URLs to individual files as short as possible

Use of index.html filename

One of the essential aspects of having a well thought out and organized web site is to conform to the standardized filenames used for the Web. A basic web site should contain an index page for the "homepage" or top level page of your site or folder structure. Most Web servers default to using the index.html, index.htm, or default.html page. Our policy and procedure is to use "index.html" only. Other pages within your site can be labeled appropriately for their areas based on the above rules (ie. about.html, contactus.html, etc.).

Any questions or concerns, about the above policy, please contact the webmaster.

Maintained by webmaster@wpi.edu
Last modified: Oct 24, 2008, 10:20 EDT