Content Organizational Strategies

When we talk about content organization in reference to creating your space online the purpose is to answer a few basic questions about your intended audience and the way they navigate your site(s):


 * What information do you want to convey on the root website (where the user lands when they type yourdomain.com)
 * Do you want your blog to be a separate space from that?
 * In addition to your blog what other information do you plan on hosting in your space? For example could you create course sites similar to UMW Blogs using this space?
 * How much or how little media should you host locally? Do you want to upload your photos to your space, or use something like Flickr and embed image from that service? Would your videos still go on YouTube and Vimeo, or would you plan to make sure all of that is stored in your space as well?

This document intends to guide some of those questions, but it's important to understand there is no right or wrong way to use your space as there are so many possibilities and the answers are often dependent on how you intend to take advantage of this web space. To begin let's look at folder structure which relates to where people go when they type in various combinations of your domain.

It is often the case that students and faculty wish to have their main domain be a professional presence that answers the questions: "Who is this person? What do they do? Where can I find more information about what they're doing?" For example we often recommend students in a particular course who will be using the space for blogging as a part of that course not have that blog be at the root domain, rather in a subdomain like DS106.mydomain.com. You can read more about what a subdomain is and how to set them up at Creating a Subdomain. This does not mean that you wouldn't necessarily want to install Wordpress on your main site. There are a lot of great simple "business card" style Wordpress themes that allow you to put in contact information, your C.V., and anything else that would contribute to your "professional presence" online. Think of the homepage of your website like the "Meet the Faculty" directory at UMW (Example) with the difference being you have complete control of the look and feel of the site as well as the content.

Subdomains are a common way of segregating content based on courses or interest. Think of them as separate secondary domains that you own. You could have photos.mydomain.com that might be running software designed for photo galleries and essentially create your own Flickr. You can have a blog around a single topic or area of research similar to how we built the faculty initiative site on a subdomain. You are not limited in any way on the number of subdomains you can have or what gets installed and displayed on them. Because these areas are segregated from your main site there are times you might wish to make sure those coming to your homepage know that they exist. If you have Wordpress installed on that homepage you could easily create a list of links to your various other sites.

You might also find yourself just wanting a space to upload documents to easily share them with others. You can do this using either a subdomain container to house them like documents.mydomain.com or a subfolder like mydomain.com/documents. Truthfully, on the server these spaces all exist as a series of folders. The root website is located in the httpdocs folder and subdomains get their own folder (which you name when you create the subdomain). A subfolder would be a folder inside either the root home site or inside of a subdomain, so if I created a folder called "media" and put it inside httpdocs I now have a url that looks like mydomain.com/media and if I put an image called MyPicture.jpg in that folder I can tell someone to go to mydomain.com/media/MyPicture.jpg to see and download it. As you can see this is a fairly manual process but helps you to understand how your content is organized on your site and how that relates to where it exists in your server space. Wordpress and other publishing platforms can ease the pain of this by providing the ability to upload media directly and giving you a link automatically.

So as you can see when making decisions about how your content will be organized there are many ways to approach it, and some may fit better for certain scenarios than others. In the end it's very simple to move this content around, so we encourage you to experiment with the tools and see what works and what doesn't. If you decide something isn't working well as a subdomain you can always move it somewhere else later.

You can read more, specifically, about the difference between subdomains vs. subfolders.