I have designed a webpage to replace an existing one, my design has not been uploaded to the server yet and is in its own folder on my computer

In the WWW folder on the server where all the web page infomation goes there are mountains of folders. What I would like to know is if there are any folders or files that I need to preserve? or can I completely wipe the entire folder to make way for my own stuff?

This is the first time I have made a website for online and I would appreciate the help.

Cheers

(Sorry if this is in the wrong forum but I thought this seemed the most likely place.)

Just preserve (or overwrite) the index.html file since this file represents the page you see when you enter your domain. If deleted then people will be able to see your FTP directory.

As for other folders; If it is a fresh server and not one passed onto you then I guess you could delete folders although I don't see the point since sometimes these are frontpage folders or CGI-BINs. Best to leave it and just add to the FTP.

Can you give the names of a couple of folders for example?

You can copy your contents of wwwroot folder at your local machine for the security reason and then remove the folders from it and then copy your contents inside the wwwroot folder through FTP.

It is an old site and I am completely redoing the whole thing, the creater of the previous site was horrid with his file structure and it is a complete mess, not to mention the www folder is packed full of old/useless files that clog it up and saving the folders takes ages just to do one. So I really do not want to leave any of the old stuff on it.


There is also a forum that I want to keep currently online (the discussions folder), is it likely that there will be files outside this folder that support it?

oh and to give you an indication of how painful this might be... I selected 4 of the folders and it was registering at 6hours for just the 4. Selecting less no doubt will reduce the time but it will be painful waiting just to transfer these potentially useless files.

No, your discussion folder should be fine if you delete anything outside the folder but in rare cases you may mess something up however if it is a IPB, phpBB, vB, vision board etc then no, you won't be messing anything up. At worst a image file may go missing.

As for the rest of your folders; looks good to delete. I would recommend backing up everything then deleting so you can always recover if need be.

and yeah, nothing worse than taking over a project to find a sloppy and bloated FTP. There are folders there with spaces and capitalisation!!