Your Website's Home Page

After you sign up with a web host and have gained access to your account's control panel, one of the very first things you'll be asked to do is to establish a home page. Just to clarify, the phrase "home page" can refer to several things in internet parlance. It can refer to the page that your web browser defaults to when you first start it up or it can colloquially refer to a personal or hobby page on the internet.

But for our purposes here, "home page" will refer to the starting page or the entry page to your website. The file name of this page on your website is typically calledone of the following:

• index.htm
• index.html
• default.htm
• default.html

Now you may have noticed throughout your travels on the internet that many URLs don't actually have a file name at the end to indicate exactly which web page is being requested. To explain, let's say for example the URL to your website is:

http://www.your_domain_name.com/

Since there is no file name tacked on to the end of the URL, when you put this into the address bar of your web browser and hit Go, your browser is actually requesting the root directory of files that exists at this URL. Web hosts usually have their servers configured to search for and open the index.htm or the index.html file when any directory is requested by a web browser. Although this helps to abbreviate some URLs by dropping the file name, its real purpose is to prevent visitors from getting a directory list of files (á la Windows Explorer) when using a URL that requests a directory instead of a specific file.

Hence, the starting or entry page to your website, a.k.a. home page, should always be named index.htm or index.html and it should always be kept in the root directory that your web host has created for your HTML files, usually public_html (most web hosts' technical support should be able to tell you what this directory is and how to access it).

Normally, web hosts will plunk a ready-made index.htm file in your website's root directory after activating your account. This 'home page' usually displays the web host's company logo as well as some quick instructions to you that this is just a placeholder page which you should replace with one of your own.

Hence, the first thing you'll want to do is replace that home page with your own custom home page even if you're not ready to upload the rest of your website yet. You can accomplish this by creating a simple 'Under Construction' page, saving it with the file name index.htm and then using the File Manager application in your control panel to upload that to replace the default index.htm file created by your web host.



Alternatively, you can use an FTP program to upload files to your website. This is actually preferable since the control panel's File Manager app is not very visually intuitive and won't give you a sense of dealing with the two key locations involved when uploading files.

And those are:

• The offline copy of your website on your own computer
• The online copy of your website on your web host's server

If you don't have a good FTP program, you should download and install a good free FTP program called FireFTP (requires the Firefox web browser).

Wait a minute.

You do have a copy of your website saved to your home computer, right?

If not, for shame!   :o)

Do NOT pass Go and do NOT collect $200.

Instead, go directly to the next page in this tutorial and learn how easy it is to build a complete fully functional copy of your website offline...