Web Directory Questions

I have been working w/ asp for the last couple of years and i always set up a certian directory structure.

Documents - All my content pages

Include - All files that need to be included, javascirpt, css, vb

Security - Log in Files

Images - Images

I have my set set up and i seem to be having problems getting my css file to work in development mode. If i publish the web site and access it from a remote server then it works fine but locally it does not take the css. Also the images seem to be off. I just went into the css editor and added the image but it does not take. It displays Images/Backgound.gif when it needs to be /Images/Background.gif.

Has any 1 else had problems w/ links to pages. It seems like when i try to correct the links then i can publish the web site because those links dont exists.

How are you pathing them?

When you dev local, the path is often /localhost/site but when you publish the site is /site. That means that things like "~" can be tricky... "" is the root when it's its own domain but "/site/" may be the root now...

Watch those things... see what you are getting and code them carefully.

Server.MapPath("~") and Server.MapPath("~/") are different as well.

well it seems that if i do this ../ it is working correclty on both ends but there are still some inconsistencies on the site. I was told by someone else to try ../ but a few years ago i stopped using that method and used / to take me to the root. Someone told me not to use ../ a few years back even though it works it was a bad practice.

Any thoughts toward this?

Ok here is my finding and im just wondering if there is any way around this so i dont have to constently change the pathing on the web site as i go from development to live.

When in development i have to path like this

/Website1/Include/HomeWeb.css

Where Website1 is the name of the web site. Now this works when i am running pages directly from VS. But when i publish the web site i have to change the path to this

/Include/HomeWeb.css

Now i would prefer not to have to change the pathing evertime.

Is there a solution to this problem??
Thanks

Server.MapPath("~/include1/blah")

The ~ tells it to start at the root of the APP. As long as none of the subfolders/dirs (ie Include) are virtual then this will work fine, or should