I created my homepage html file, but

Question

I have my homepage html file, lets call it home.html

Technically, to get to that file, my user would need to go to www.example.com/home.html no?

How do I do it so www.example.com automatically runs home.html without any redirections?

Answer 1

If you are using Apache, naming your homepage file 'index.html' will get it to be detected at www.example.com by default. If you want to change it to accept home.html as a valid directory index page, you will need to edit the DirectoryIndex directive in your configuration file:

DirectoryIndex index.html home.html whatever_other_pages_you_want_to_list.html

Answer 2

Standard servers accept 3 names to auto-detect as your homepage;

• index.*
• default.*
• home.*

If you're using a big webhost like hostmonster or godaddy, those 3 should be accepted.

Basically that DirectoryIndex is inside of the configuration file for Apache, which is a program that runs on servers. When your user goes to example.com, the server will look for the files on that line to display as the page, since none was specified. It goes in order of precedence, meaning the line that Shaun put up, it will look for index.html first, then if it didn't find that it would look for home.html, then whatever_other_pages_you_want_to_list.html. Index, default, and home are just the normal pages, but you can specify you're own if you'd like.

*- meaning .html, .htm, .php, .asp, .aspx, .xhtm, .xhtml, etc.