It is surprising how quickly a web site can grow, and even more surprising is the number of files that you have to deal with. Every page, image, thumbnail, animation etc. is a separate file and all of these files are linked to each other. If one of these links becomes broken, your site won't display properly, or even worse, it won't navigate properly.

At the time of writing (5th June 2002), this site, which is still in its infancy has 247 files in 47 folders. (Update 28th January, 2003 - now 437 files in 50 folders) and on January 20 , 2006 it stands at 828 files in 67 folders. See what I mean about how a site can grow.

If you don't get yourself organised right from the start, you are soon going to have trouble finding the items that you are looking for, you will have problems keeping your internal links working, and even worse, you may break links from other web sites to your site.

It is difficult enough to get other sites to link to you. If you break these links, then the other web sites are unlikely to fix them, they will just remove the link.

Another point to bear in mind is the search engines. It is difficult enough to get good rankings from the search engines to start with. If you keep moving pages and causing the search engines to point to broken links, you may find your site blacklisted by the search engines. The search engine companies work hard to build up a reputation for providing good useful results, they won't have that reputation spoiled by sites that keep on providing broken links.

What you have to remember is that when you upload your site to the web host, you are creating a mirror image of your layout from the local hard drive. Even though programs such as Dreamweaver, FrontPage etc. make it easy to reorganise your site locally, and automatically fix up all of your internal links, you may be moving pages that other sites have already linked to.