When you site is new naming files is easy, just give the file a descriptive name, upload it to the site and it's ready for delivery. But once your site matures and you have hundreds of documents or media files for distribution you'll quickly realize that it's hard to separate this years sermons from last years.

To make it easy to manage your files, specifically those files that are intended for distribution via download to your visitors we recommend incorporating the date into every file you upload. The best method by far is to use the following convention - Year/Month/Date/Name. By doing so all of your files will be sorted using the date first followed by the name.

A typical file may look as follows:
050803Newsletter.pdf. This tells you everything you need to know about the file. In this case the file is the August 3rd 2005 Newsletter. More importantly this method will also sort the file in the Document Manager by date. Add the proper folder structure to this method and your visitors will find it very easy to locate the specific file they are looking for.

A perfect example of this method in a modified format is employed by Doug Urban at Shepherd of the Hills in San Antonio Texas. As you can see, Doug names his files with the following format - Month/Day/Year.mp3. He also then separates them into folders by month and year presenting the most current sermons for easy access and files the other, older sermons in monthly folders for archiving.



He then uses the advanced file properties area to add the Title, Author, and Date of the sermon for easy identification.

You can access the advanced file properties by clicking on the small "Clip Board"  to the far right of the file name.

Once in the file properties edit mode you can see below how Doug makes it very clear to the users the specifics of a given file.



You will find the working example here.

Another good example can be found on Trinity Freistadt's site here. This is taking the naming convention to its simplest form of Month/Year.pdf. When January 2006 rolls along the Trinity administrator will move all of the 2005 "Tower" documents into a "2005" folder and start out all over again with new issues of the Tower for 2006 in the "root" Tower folder.