I'd like visitors to my web site to automatically be taken to the home page when they enter my domian name. For example, when they type in thedomainame.com the will automatically see thedomainame.com/homepage.

Is this done by using htaccess?

Can you someone explain this to me? How it works and how to set it up?

thanks.

Why would you want that? Why not just put the home page in the root?

Your server should be set up to show index.html, index.htm, index.php and so on as soon as you enter yoursiteurl.com in your browser.

You can set your server up to accept other file names, but this may be problematic with some shared hosting accounts, and there's little point if it's as simple as renaming a file.

You could also try using JavaScript to redirect the user if you really need to send them to a sub directory.
This is also possible with PHP using headers like this:

PHP Code:

<?php
 header("Location: http://www.google.com/");
?>

You'd put that in index.php on it's own and when the user goes to yoursiteurl.com/ it will send them to wherever the header function is being told to send them (Google in this case).

Is this done by using htaccess?

It can be. However, given that all your other questions are about ASP, you can't! .htaccess is for Apache only NOT IIS.

It is actually better to NOT have the index pagename show up in the url for many reasons.
The main one being;
Should you change the name of the index page for any reason, all of your existing links to the root will still work.

HTML Redirect -

<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html"> - http://www.web-source.net/html_redirect.htm