Naming Site Assets

Site assets in Site Studio Designer are intended to be reused. Since the asset itself can be used in not only different areas of a Web site, but also in different Web sites that you are designing, the naming of each asset is important. With a good naming scheme, assets can be more easily managed and more easily deployed in one or many areas of a Web site, and one or many Web sites.

The best way to name an asset is to describe what it does and how it functions, rather than by using a name based on where an asset is used in a Web site.

The first thought of many designers is to put the name of the Web site in the name of each asset. This would group them together when listing the contents of the content server. But the difficulty here is when you run multiple Web sites, since all of the assets are reusable. Rather than create an entirely new set of assets and definitions for a certain section in your Web site, you can easily import the other assets you've already created. In doing so, though, when the assets have the name of the other Web site in the name, this can cause some issues of continuity, understanding, and even some confusion regarding why some assets are present. Names of the assets should also avoid the place of the asset within the Web site.

Hierarchy Showing a Poorly Named Template

In the image, you can see the issue in naming an asset based on location. By naming the page template originally intended to be the primary page template as "primary_template," we caused some problems when we realized that it would also be the template used on the secondary pages. Proper planning would have eliminated this issue, giving the template a name such as "page_template_with_2_placeholders."

Consider these two different methods of naming the site assets in your project:

Naming convention with little planning toward maintenance:	Naming convention with considered planning toward maintenance
placeholder_def_1 p_def_2 default_definition front_page_template subtemplate_up element_title region_replace	element_def_WYSIWYG_fulledit element_def_imageonly_minedit placeholderdef_subtemplate_newslist regiondef_customform regiontemplate_title_and_body pagetemplate_home pagetemplate_errorhandler

Future updates are much easier to handle when the assets are named to describe what they do, allowing you to place them as needed. This also means you do not have to look in all managed Web sites for an asset that you have already created.