Suppose you are a new iSchool student. You know that our school provides each student Web server space for file storage and web publishing and you want to create your own Website by starting to create a homepage. On this homepage, you may want to briefly introduce yourself and maybe want to insert your own photo or some of your favorite pictures. You may also want to provide a link to your class projects and a link to your resume page which may help you find a part-time job on campus. By analyzing the page content, we know that we need to create at least three WebPages: one is homepage, one is resume page, and one is class project page.

Before we start to create those pages, we need to know the directories that we will use so that we can built a site structure. Each account on the Web server has a home directory. When you login, you will be in your home directory. Let’s use SSH to log into our Web server. The host name would be “login.ischool.utexas.edu”, and enter your username and password. If you login for the first time, you will notice that “desktop” folder and “mail” folder already exist. You have to create your public_html folder by yourself. Please reference our tutorial on “how to publish Web Pages” to learn how to create public_html folder. This folder should be the main folder intended for HTML files. This public_html folder should contain all of your HTML files. And that is where we will put our Webpages.

You need to have a sub-directory named images in your public_html directory that contains all the images referenced in homepage and other Web pages contained in public_html. You can put all of your general graphics files, the buttons, logos, background images, photos, etc. in the images folder. Since we’ve decided to insert a picture on our homepage, the picture should go to this image folder.

You can create a new folder by clicking this icon-new folder icon, or ctr+N on keyboard.

Since we are also gonna build pages on our resume and the class projects, it is much better to keep these pages in their appropriate sub-directories.
1. We should have a sub-directory within our public_html directory called resume, and projects
2. We will put different formats of our resume, for example, HTML(.html), PDF (.pdf), and straight text (.txt) in resume sub-directory.
3. Within the projects sub-directory, you will create an index.html page that presents information on projects and we will put all your projects into this folder.
4. If we have many projects and we want to categorize them, within projects sub-directory, we may create several sub-directories. For example, we can create webDesign sub-directory within projects a sub-directory to save all our projects related to Web Design; or we can create a sub-directory called database within projects sub-directory and we can put all our database projects into this sub-directory.

Get confused? Here is the whole structure, displayed graphically, would help you understand better: if you login for the first time, you will be in your home directory. And you need create a public_html folder to save all of your HTML files. Within public_html folder, we need create a file called “index.html”. This should be your homepage. Then we need create sub-directories. One is image directory, one is resume, and the other is projects sub-directory. In images folder, we are going to put all of our images files referenced in homepage and other pages to this images folder. Then we are going to put three formats of our resume into the resume sub-directory: one is webpage-resume.html, one is resume.pdf, and the other is resume.txt file. In project sub-directory, we will create a index.html file. This should be the webpage that presents information on class projects. If we have many projects and we want to categorize them, we can create as many sub-directories as we need. In this example, we will create two sub-directories within project sub-directory: one is called webDesign and we will put all of our projects related to web design into this folder; the other is called database and we will put all our database-related projects into this sub-directory.