Web File Name Conventions

Web file naming conventions
When creating your web site, you must be very methodical when naming your files. First, never use spaces, uppercase letters, or any special characters in your file names. While your site may seem to work OK in Dreamweaver, on your local computer, once you put the web site on the server, violating these rules can cause you no end of problems.

For the web page file names, be sure you use “index.html” (or “index.htm”) for your first web page. Using this special name will tell the server to display this page as the default page for any directory of html files.

Other HTML files should have meaningful names such as products.html or about_us.html, rather than convenient names such as page1.html. Name your files as if you giving the web site to someone else to work on, and who won’t be able to ask you any questions about it (for example, you 6 months after the project is finished when you can’t remember anything about it).

Web file naming rules:
• No spaces in the filenames
• Use all lowercase letters
• No special characters in the filenames: For example none of the following are acceptable in web filenames: “!~:&(,
• The files MUST have the proper suffix (.html, .gif, .jpg)
• Be consistent in your naming of files, for example use the same prefix in a series of files. Also, to ensure that the files alphabetize correctly, always “zero-pad” your filenames when they have numbers in them. In other words, if you have a series of files numbered 1-20, the first file should be something like myfile01.jpg, and the last file should be named myfile20.jpg.

And again, it’s critical that you name your files correctly from the start. If you attempt to rename your files after you’ve created your site, you will, in all likelihood, break all the links in your web pages.

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