Whether you organize your site right from the beginning or clean it up after years of work the process is pretty much the same. The difference is that if you wait to organize it until later you may have a lot of links to fix after moving your files around. On the other hand it could be easier to organize it after you have had it for a while because you already know what you are using it for and what kinds of files (pages) you have.
The most important thing to remember when organizing your site is to do it in a way that makes sense to you. You are the one that is going to have to keep track of your Web pages and you are the one that is going to have to find the pages when you need them. You are also the one who is going to have to link to them. Knowing where they are and what folders you have them in is going to make linking to them easier. This is why you have to link to them in a way that will make it easy for you to know where every page is located without having to look it up first.
Most hosting services have a program that allows you to create folders. This is a great way to organize your site. Create a different folder for each different part of your site. Let's say you have a typical family Web site. You might have pages on your site about your kids, your pets, yourself, your spouse, your hobbies and things you feel strongly about. You could create a separate folder for each of your children, each of your pets and each of your hobbies or you can just create a general folder for children, pets and hobbies.
Within your folders you can further categorize your pages by giving them specific file names. Let's say your children's names are Kevin and Sarah. You can name any page about Kevin starting with a "K". For instance a page about Kevin's baseball game could be called "kbaseball.htm". This page would be placed in the "children" folder. Likewise, a page about Sarah's baseball game would be called "sbaseball.htm" and could also be placed in the "children" folder.
Another way you can name your pages is with dates. When you do it this way it's best to do it with the year first, then the month, then the days. I only use year and month with mine but you can do yours any way you want. The reason I say to use the year first and the month second is because both your computer and the server where your site is hosted with file them in order if you do it this way. Always use the zero's too. If you leave the zero out of the month or day then your files will not be filed in order. What I mean by this is if you are doing February the number would be "02" and not just "2". Say little Sarah's baseball game was on June 7, 2002. The name of the file could look something like this "020607baseball.htm".
You can also have folders inside of folders. Say you created a separate folder for Sara and you want to separate her baseball pages from her ballet pages. Create a separate folder for each one inside of the "Sarah" folder. Your page address to the baseball page you wrote will look something like this "http://mypages.com/sarah/baseball/020607baseball.htm".
When it comes to graphics I suggest having one folder for all your graphics. This way you can use any graphic on any page anywhere on your site. It's your site, so you can do it anyway you want. The other say would be to create a different graphics or image folder on each section of your site. You could have a graphics folder for Sarah's graphics and another one under Kevin's folder for graphics on his pages.
For safety's sake, keep a copy of all your Web page for your whole site saved on your computer or to a disk. This way if the hosting service goes away or something else happens and all your pages are lost you will have a backup. When you back up your Web site keep the files in the same order that you have them on your hosting service. Not only will this make it easier for you to save your updated files but it will also help you to re-install your site should the need arise.
