I’ve never really understood the best practice strategy for putting information in the General Settings/Meta Data/Folder field. Browser title, no issue. However I’m a bit confused about what to put for folder, especially if a page is nested. Whatever you put, does it need to be lower case, no spaces, etc.?
Looked everywhere in the new RW 7 manual but it doesn’t even go over this.
OK, here is how I do it. Let’s say my website is www.mywidget.com. On the home page I have links to About Us, Store, Management and Contact Us. Here is how I would make folders for that site:
About Us = about-us
Store = store
Management = management
Contact Us = contact-us
Now, some people would prefer to use an underscore ( _ ) instead of a dash, that would work too. When you make folders like this, your file names of your pages will be either index.html or index.php, making it a cleaner site. So if someone wanted to go to your about us page, the url would be:
www.mywidget.com/about-us/
you do not need to include the index.html and it looks cleaner than
www.mywidget.com/aboutus.html
At least in my opinion it looks cleaner. If you are using RapidWeaver 6 or 5, I think you have to be sure tidy links are turned on, in RapidWeaver 7 it is auto turned on (I think). The settings for all 3 are in the Advanced settings of the General settings.
Thank you for the helpful clarification. Yes, RW 7 does have “tidy Website Links” checked by default. I wan’t sure about the underscore vs the dash, but I prefer the dash (easier to see). I do believe all lowercase is the protocol. I also have a question on the filename field. If it is a single page - say for example the page is titled Photography, the filename would be photography.html. If it is a nested/child page, the filename would still reflect the page name, photography.html. In the case of filename field, it doesn’t matter if it is a nested page or not. I assume photography classes would be photography-classes.html.
However what do you do for a top level page that has nested pages under it. Do you leave the file name field blank? I got a warning window when I tried to put the title of the page in the filename field, so I’m thinking I shouldn’t put anything there-correct?
For a top level page, do you change the folder name, or leave it as “page 4” or whatever.
Good question… these things take some thinking as they are very important. That is one drawback of a tool like RW in that it make doing sites easy but in doing so some concepts are not addressed (like deleting old and changed files on your server so they don’t get indexed by google.).
In setting up structure things that affect how you name folders (and meta data used) might be:
Those are just a few of the many things to consider.
I see from previous post now (just refreshed) that this may NOT (corr) be info you were looking for but since I typed it I’ll post it… 
For nested folders, I would do this, back to my example:
www.mywidget.com/about-us
Now, let’s say you list all of the important people in the company here and you want each to link to a different page, let’s say 4 people with these names:
George
Allison
Jonathan
Carrie
Here is how I would make their pages:
www.mywidget.com/about-us/george
www.mywidget.com/about-us/allison
www.mywidget.com/about-us/jonathan
www.mywidget.com/about-us/carrie
so each person’s name is a folder and then you get the index.html or index.php again. Again, giving you a cleaner look.
Make sense??
Good info @1611mac. Thank you for posting! I’m not sure I understand everything you said, so I will need to read it several times.
Yes Rob, many thanks.
Ask questions, happy to help. I inherited a 1700 page that was a real mess. Don’t forget that google and crawlers look at your server… not into RW, so it is important to keep your site lean and mean. Get a good FTP app if you don’t have one. Using RW export and then ftp’ing your files is good for learning. Teaches you what files RW exports (can be different due to smart publishing) and where they go. You’ll make mistakes in directory and file naming or you will just want to change names and you’ll have to use ftp to delete the old files on the server.
Site “housekeeping” is very important…
If you have questions just ask…
Basically a folder per web page, leave the file name it’s default index.html/php
Name the folder NOT THE file.
Don’t confuse a webpage with the index.html/php file, a webpage consists of many elements, images, CSS styling, linked videos etc etc.