I'm currently using Dreamweaer 8 and have specified the site's homepage. For the homepage to open when a user types in the site's url, does the homepage have to be called index.html?


What I mean is: when I type www.yahoo.com, does the page that comes up have to be index.html?

index or default with extension htm,html,asp,php.......

Even if I've to Dreamweaver which page is going to be the home page, do I still need to rename?

Actually, no, you don't. You can make your site's home page anything you want -- BUT, unless you can get your hosting company to change the default page in the server setup, you're going to be stuck with the usual choices, which Moondog mentioned.

The question is other than the extension, why would you want to rename the page?

index.asp or index.html or index.php should be fine?

You can always make your index page automatically redirect to another page, but you'll really annoy users that try to use the back button and automatically get put right back on your page; man I hate those.

You can also have home.html etc...

like many people have pointed out your homepage can be whatever page you want if you have control of the hosting server. Chances are your hosting company is not going to change their default page to dustin.html just for you.... But there is no real reason why you wouldn't want the homepage to be named index.html... Usually the user does not see the index.html anyway like your example of www.yahoo.com what you see there is actually the index.html but you don't see that extention.. if you typed www.yahoo.com/index.html you would see the same site (minus some random images)

As I'm new to webdesign and am designing a website, I named the homepage homepage.html. After reading your responses, I rensamed it to index.html in Dreamweaver which corrected all the links to and from that page.

Thank you!

You can actually work around it using PHP, instead of redirect. Your host will have to support PHP (at least version 3).

PHP Code:

<?php
  // True homepage file
    $trueHome = "http://www.yourdomain.com/home.htm";
  
  // Load here
    if (file_exists($trueHome)) {
      include($trueHome); }
    else {
      echo "<h1>Page Cannot Be Displayed</h1>\n<p>You have tried to access a page that does not exist on this server.</p>"; }
?>

Save this as index.php

Change the value in trueHome (the web address) to the page and extension you want to use for your home page. It will check to see if the file exists in the event that it does, then it will load it (display it). Otherwise, it will produce a can not be displayed error. There is HTML markup and \n. The markup is automatically parsed and displayed as it should. The \n simply means new line.

Really, there isn't any point but it helps if you want to go down a more advanced PHP route.

Originally Posted by Mohab

I'm currently using Dreamweaer 8 and have specified the site's homepage. For the homepage to open when a user types in the site's url, does the homepage have to be called index.html?


What I mean is: when I type www.yahoo.com, does the page that comes up have to be index.html?

Yes - donest have to be but much less complicated if its called index.html, index.htm, index.php, index.asp - or one of those!

Originally Posted by coldturkey

Yes - donest have to be but much less complicated if its called index.html, index.htm, index.php, index.asp - or one of those!

If you edit the httpd.conf (Apache) to allow random.thing as a home file and extension, then it will do it. Only problem with .php or .asp is that not many free hosts support it (and some paid don't either).

I suppose the .xhtml extension would also work.

Sweet I learn something new everyday! that's a cool work around Mooofasa!

Originally Posted by Mooofasa

You can actually work around it using PHP, instead of redirect. Your host will have to support PHP (at least version 3).

PHP Code:

<?php
  // True homepage file
    $trueHome = "http://www.yourdomain.com/home.htm";
 
  // Load here
    if (file_exists($trueHome))
      include($trueHome);
    else
      echo "<h1>Page Cannot Be Displayed</h1>\n<p>You have tried to access a page that does not exist on this server.</p>"
?>

Save this as index.php

Change the value in trueHome (the web address) to the page and extension you want to use for your home page. It will check to see if the file exists in the event that it does, then it will load it (display it). Otherwise, it will produce a can not be displayed error. There is HTML markup and \n. The markup is automatically parsed and displayed as it should. The \n simply means new line.

Really, there isn't any point but it helps if you want to go down a more advanced PHP route.

By far the best way to do it is to just set the index page in your .htaccess file. That way you don't waste any of the users time by redirecting them with silly php or html scripts. All you need to do is to create a file in the root of your website called ".htaccess" (or edit your current one) and add the following:

DirectoryIndex filename.html

All you need to do is to change filename.html to the name of the file you wish to be the default index page.