The lack of a complex directory structure makes website maintenance easier.
The number of files in the root folder will be large. Navigation via File Explorer would not be intuitive. If it was desired to classify files by department using prefixes on the file names, the names are likely to be long.
People are used to complex directory structures and expect documents to be
classified by their location,. ie. metadata about the document is stored implicitly
by storing related files in a folder.
Directory structures built around departmental classification are vulnerable to high maintenance as they become redundant as soon as the organisational structure changes. They also imply ownership of the documents by the department whereas anything of business significance is owned by the organisation and hence best to be centrally managed.
Staff are familiar with Word and it is easy to produce structured documents.
Using Word 97 documents can be saved as HTML.
There may be issues as to which copy is the master. If staff source in Word and then save the HTML they may be reluctant to delete the Word document. To get tidy web pages there will be some editing of the Word HTML output. Staff would need to be familiar with Word and a web product such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage. Anything sourced as DOC will need conversion prior to deployment on the web. If Word 2000 is used to generate HTML an associated folder is created for each document saved. This is outside of the users control and any files that the document references will be copied to the folder. This would mean a proliferation of image files that would waste storage and make central maintenance very difficult.
Staff are used to using Microsoft Word to source and store information. It is easier to use a wordprocessor than a web authoring tool such as FrontPage. The conflict over different formats of the same document is removed.
The documents can only be easily viewed through the IE browser. NetScape doesn't
support the DOC filetype directly.
The need for Word is removed. Only staff sourcing documents for external use
would need it. Staff would all be able to publish to the web.
The company would need to purchase a lot of copies of Frontpage or Dreamweaver to allow everyone to source web pages.
Option five is simpler to maintain. It eliminates conflict between the Word
format and HTML and places the company in a good position to exploit the Internet
by introducing all staff to web publishing.
With regard to storing in one big folder or lots of subdirectories it would
be best to have a standard structure replicated for each department or part
of the website.
If divided by department each department would have its own index.html file
that would contain their departmental local menu options and pages. In this
scenario there would be an image folder for each department rather than having
just one for the organisation. The top level directory structure would be replicated
at each level.
Possibly :-
root (containing
index.html and all high level menu documents, as HTML)
-------images (GIF,
JPG, BMP etc.)
-------admin (Any
documents, as html, relating to the adminstration of the web site, of use to
the webmaster)