The Problem with "folders" on Websites

Over my course of developing a bunch of websites, I think that there is a fundamental problem with website development. And that problem is to do with folders.

In a nutshell, people do not understand folders, and website developers do not understand how to display information based on the folder structure.

Web-Server developers have grappled with the question of "how do I display a folder"? Apache uses standard icons to display the contents of a folder, and has decreed that a standard file (usually called "index.html") would be displayed if a user tried to display a folder, rather than displaying another specific file within that folder. This made sense because the index file was only supposed to show an index of all the other pages and sub-folders in the requested folder.

However, things started to get complicated once the usage of websites started to pick-up. Quickly the structure of websites became close-to-useless to users. Users started to say "I don't care where it is, as long as I can click on something and find it easily". This has meant that pages (not folders) with useful content must be created.

Things have continued to get even more complicated as companies have added their own twist of the age-old folders and pages paradigm. For example, Microsoft uses the terms "Channnels" and "Postings" for its Content Management Server system. (the other thing that I find totally frustrating with Microsoft Content Management Server is that Pages (erch - make that "Postings") have a "Name" and a "Display Name". To a non-techy user - how would you differentiate between a "Name" and a "Display Name"?!! How about using "File Name" and "Title"?!! (that's actually what 'name' and 'display name' mean)) Plus the filename of "index.htm" seemed too simple to those at Microsoft, who decided to call these index pages "default.htm" - further muddying the waters.

All problems with Folders and index/default pages come to a crunch when you have to display a navigation scheme for your website. Basically, you have to choose if you will display a) only folders, b) only pages or c) some mixture of folders and pages. Most of the sites that I have been involved with have picked option A (display only folders) because that is the easiest thing to do. However, I believe that from a users perspective (that doesn't care about the whole folders & pages thing), it's the pages that actually have the information, so that's what should be displayed.

What most people don't realize, is that creating a folder is really a two step process. Step 1 is to create the folder while Step 2 is to create the index.htm or default.htm page. The follow-through to this is that any time a new, non index page, is created, you have to update the index page because new information has been added to that folder. This 2 step process is lost on basically all of the website content people that I have ever dealt with.

I figure that the solution to the folders problem is to do away with folders completely. The solution is to design around Pages and Sub-Pages. This gets away from any of the "2 Step" systems, and makes displaying navigation systems very easy.