Comments on: Project folder structure for a web designer

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:39:35 +0000

Thanks Dave..

By: Dave Woods

Dave Woods — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:51:29 +0000

Hi Rob, I’d probably drop those in a subfolder in a combination of consultancy and design. If it’s purely documentation then I’d drop it all into consultancy as that’s more of a deliverable prior to the project starting whereas something like wireframes or flow charts might be more suited to the design section.

In any case, these are merely top level folders that I use and then I use subfolders where appropriate.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:06:43 +0000

Dave, thanks for sharing your working folder. I’m in the process of setting up a generic folder structure like yours. But, I was wondering how you go about separating your research ie: Personas, Usability reports, Competitive Analysis, Flow charts and wireframes.

By: Ajith

Ajith — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 14:56:25 +0000

Thanks Dave, For a newbie like me who is struggling to manage data behind the scenes of a website and make a start, its a short and simple framework which I’ve been looking for.

Saved a lot of reading

Cheers,
Ajith

By: Agustin

Agustin — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:40:55 +0000

Excellent article, colleague! It is the best example I’ve looked at to create my own folders. Thanks!

By: Melanie

Melanie — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:12:59 +0000

Wow! Thanks Dave, this is awesome, I’m guilty of pretty lax file structure habits, hopefully this will change all that for me

By: avinash

avinash — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:11:03 +0000

userfull feedbak

Thank you All

By: Dave Woods

Dave Woods — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:35:25 +0000

Hi Will, thanks for your detailed response. Getting my email organised it probably one of the next things on my list of things to do as at the moment I just export my accounts to one PST file so should probably get that a bit more orgasnised for finding old emails. Thanks for the tip.

By: Will Hattingh

Will Hattingh — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:21:48 +0000

I love the folder structure that you use and mine is almost 100% the same, I keep a zip file within my template zip file called template project which is used to quickly add a new project for a client. For instance if I’m adding a new CMS as a different project for the client I can just quickly unzip my project zip file that contains the folder structure that you currently have.

One addition to this is I keep an additional folder to that of the projects called _MAIL at the top level of the client which contains the outlook data files as I communicate with the client. I also keep multiple profiles in outlook for each client, that is if the client requires me to have an email box. For smaller projects this would probably never be required, however I do consulting for some clients where we act as a go between the client and the clients vendors, so essentially we act as employees and as such we have to have employee email. Which makes the _MAIL folder incredibly useful, especially since if a year after we are done with the project and I need access to an old email that was sent then I can just open the datafile directly in outlook even though I may have deleted that outlook profile already.

I develop and work through multiple workstations & laptops so I stick the entire client folder within subversion, that way everything stays in sync.

If I develop directly on my laptop it makes it easy to point apache’s DocumentRoot directly at the Code folder, that way if I update from my svn repo I automagically get the latest code and can view and display it to customer if need be.

By: Dave Woods

Dave Woods — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:35:27 +0000

I’d use SVN just on the Code folder personally but don’t think there’s any reason why you couldn’t use it on everything if you wanted. I use the date as a prefix to all my documentation and then have this run as an automatic backup so that works fine as version control for me but SVN would also be a good solution.