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Ghost Of Winter

Organization Time!

Organizing your Hard drive should be something you do before you even think about building your first website in MY opinion. The reason I say this is because it allows you to work FAR smarter. I bet if I asked you to locate a specific page that you created years ago that you would have trouble finding it. Why is that? MOST webmasters are very unorganized in storage of files on both their HDD as well as on their server. I know one particular person that got a NEW HDD just for their web pages and started downloading everything they had on the server and found FPAs and pics whole SITES that they had forgotten about! Now I'm not going to kid you and tell you I have ALWAYS been this organized, FAR from it. I found out the hard way you need to not only be organized but also have backups. In my last article I went into detail about doing backups so I won't do that here. All I WILL say is, that if you have everything organized then it makes backing up a LOT easier

I have one HDD that is designated for all my Web business, and make NO mistake this IS a business. For those that don't have the luxury of having a separate Hard Drive for their Web business I am going to walk you through this as if you are creating this on your only Hard Drive. Make a folder and call it whatever you want. Mine says 'Webs'. Now within this folder I have a NUMBER of folders. I have a folder for each of my 32 domains. There is also on for my Central SSI virtual folder. I have one that has about 1400 yea you read that right 1400 backgrounds! (thank you Voltar for about 50% of them)

I also have a folder called New Projects. The domain and the SSI folders are mirror copies of what I have on that particular domain. This makes it REAL easy for me to find a particular page or problem if I find out I have a problem with www. domain.com/a/s/d/r/b/somepages . html then all I need to do is find that particular page in the file structure of the domain folder on my Hard Drive and fix it.

Now the New projects one is just that it's a catchall for all the projects I am working on at any given time so I can see at a glance just what I am working on. Once I am done with a project and I upload it to a domain I just move that corresponding folder to the appropriate Domain folder. I am such a person that I sometimes get burned out on a project if I work on it every day until it is done, so I usually have several projects going at the same time. Some are more pressing than others.

In the last article I told you about the importance of backing up your work on a regular basis, well by organizing it neatly on your Hard Drive you have saved yourself some time. And as we ALL know time IS money. So I hope this has helped someone to work smarter and not harder. Use the time you save to build more, or learn something like PHP, or maybe how to use Photoshop better. There is ALWAYS something to learn.

Ghost Of Winter