I'm trying to revise the home page for a client's website which was built for him by a search engine optimization company and there's a very large shopping cart as part of the site too. I'm at a loss to find the right page to download since there's no page called index.html. I've downloaded a bunch of pages from the site with names ending in html, .aspx and also .xml but can't locate the page which appears as the home page when bringing up the site. Any ideas what a home page could be called if not index.html? Sorry, I'm just a graphic artist--build sites in GoLive and Flash and understand html pretty well--but without index.html, I have no idea how to find the home page. Thank you in advance!

Don't you have an FTP access ?

If the site is generated via a server side language, it could be virtually anything, though it tends to be index.{something}

Or it could be Server Side Includes (SSI), which means that your home page could be a combination of small fragments assembled together by server commands inserted into the document.

You really should try to get access to the ftp account of the site.
It would make things much easier.

Another common one would be index.php.

Yes I have ftp access. That's how I was able to go in and look at everything that's on the server for my client. And that's how I discovered to my dismay that there's no index. html page. I downloaded about 12 pages that I thought might be it...but didn't find it. Didn't find an index.php either.

Is there a page called default.html, or default.(something)? Most hosts configure the servers to use index as the default, but I think some will still use "default".

there's default.aspx. I had downloaded that one and taken a look. There's not much to the page; it appears as only code when I preview it in Firefox and the first thing it says is Page Language=c+. Then it says Inherits="AspDotNetStorefront._default" CodeFile="default.aspx.cs"
I think even if I found the page, I wouldn't be able to make the graphic revisions my client wants.

ASP is a server side interpreted language.
It means that the page contain script code, like a program, and that this program generate dynamically HTML that is sent back to the browser.

It means too that you need to access it through an ASP enabled web server, for it to parse it to generate to output if you want to check what is done through it.
And usually, it needs to access a database. So even installing an asp server on your local PC is not due to be enough to view the site.

I have never programmed in ASP, but I've read that the framework is constructed around templates, called "master pages".
I could not say where to find them nor how to modify them; despite that I suspect that visual studio (MS .net code editor) will be the way to go.

Yea that site was pretty much designed with ASP.net yet another Visual Web developer language. You might find it a bit tough to edit those pages scrawny.

Shaun

Thank you all so much for your help. After I couldn't find a "home page" anywhere with my ftp access, I used Firefox to just save all the files on the page, then I opened the page (which named itself with an .htm at the end) in my trusty GoLive program and voila! finally I can see how the page is put together. At that point, I saw that I might be able to make the revisions to the page my client wants, but I'd be afraid to upload it because it would no doubt be missing all kinds of links and God knows what. BOO, one more job I can't do. Thanks again for your generous help.

look for any file with the index name and any extension.

You can setup your web server to go to any pages for make it home pages.

Setup in iis