I plan to augment my existing forum website with some other features such as Chatrooms, blogs, photo galleries and a business services database.

Not knowing much about how web servers work I want to know if ALL of the website should be located in the top level of public_html or should I apply a hierachy with index.html at the root level and then forum, chat, blog, gallery and directory in their own sub directories below that?

Thanks for your help.