How should I organize files in VCS?

Question

I'm making a website and making multiple design prototypes. I want to keep all of them for future reference.

1. Is this a suitable place to use branches, or should I just put them in folders?
2. How should I manage external dependencies (e.g. jQuery), should I include a minified version for every design or keep one for the whole project or just link to an online version?

Answer 1

Branches are fine if:

• you want to compare the differences of the same file across several variation of your website
• develop in parallel said variations, in isolation (See "When should you branch?").

That won't prevent you top deploy those in different directories (you simply checkout each branch in different folder on your web server)

Any common part (like some JQuery script) should be in a sub-directory which is versioned in its own repo and referenced by your main web repo as a submodule.