On my site which is mainly images, I keep my images in a separate folder,
mainly because it makes them easier for me to find. Every .htm/.html page
uses two css files.
I'd keep the images close to the HTML, and use lots of subdirectories.
You may well have large portions of the site with a directory, a single
index.htm and lots of images all in the same directory.
An "images" directory is unnecessary. Per-directory it doesn't hurt,
but neither does it add anything you can't get from a simple sorted
directory listing.
Identify image sizes (if needed) with a suffix of "_tn" or similar,
rather than a prefix, because it's much easier to get useful directory
listings that way.
An "images" directory per-site is a bad thing. This is throwing away
organisation you could beenfot from (by sections) in favour of something
that you could get just as easily with file extensions.
An "iconic images" directory can be useful, if you have a small set of
images that are referred to from many pages, such as site section
navigation icons. Don't be afraid to duplicate these files if they're
already thumbnails - it's easier than maintaining funny links to
thumbnails in the main "image library" part of the site.
All directory names should be flattened to lower-case and have simple
punctuation (i.e. "_" is the only whitespace character) Anything else
just causes trouble.
CSS OTOH is shared from all pages, for a small number of files. So these
are best stored in a single directory, one-level below the root. Refer
to it with a simple root-relative URL, so that re-arranging pages in the
future is easy,
If you have text-as-images headers, stick them in a sub-directory under
the CSS (unless you care about NS4 support). There's usually too many to
keep the CSS directory tidy if you leave them in there themselves.
