What is the name of the Homepage?

[reddevil]

Sorry to ask this basic question but I am redisigning my site from scratch and have come to the first page....

I am working with FP2002 and want to name my homepage - what do I call it?

Am I right in suggesting that on my harddrive it will be called soemthing like
index.htm or home.htm
Does it matter which of these it is called?

So what does this matter when somebody on the internet types in www.mydomain.com when there is no reference to index or home?

[rocknbil]

Directory indexing is performed based on the server's configuration. Nomally, it's set up like this:

index.html
index.htm
home.html
home.htm
index.cgi ......

And so on. When a request is made for any directory, such as http://www.example.com/ which requests the index of the domain root, it looks for the first one, if not found, the next, and so on and if no index is found it will display the directory listing if allowed or diplay an error if it's not.

At any time, a server admin can edit the server configuration to look for a new indexing file, such as

index.mnpl (My New Programming Language. :-) There is no mhpl extension that I know of, example only)

So the short answer is, name it index.html or index.htm, but now you know why. :-)

[reddevil]

rocknbil,

Thanks for your detailed reply, I think I understand now?

My WYSIWYG editor (FP2002) shows index.htm as my homepage and I just wanted to be sure that this was correct.

More importantly, I link all of my internal pages to index.htm and so I also wanted to know if all my incoming links were pointing to the correct url/page?

[tedster]

If you are serving the site on your own domain name, the best practice is to point all the Home Page links to the "bare" domain with a closing slash:

http://www.example.com/

...rather than
http://www.example.com/index.html
...or
/index.html
...or
index.html
...or
../index.html (etc)

The link will work if it's pointed to index.html, but sometimes search engines can see this as a different url and your link popularity (or Google PR) can be split into two piles, because it really is two differnt urls.

The same principle applies for links pointing to an index page for a sub-directory -- end with the slash after the directory name and let the server pick out index.html -- again, avoid having two different urls for one page.