How to make a page your sites homepage.

Using FTP or code.

[Latch]

hi guys when you ftp a site how do you tag the home page to make it appear when the website is typed in?

For example when I type in www.whatever.com, how does it know to show my home page?
cheers L

[MichaelBluejay]

This has nothing to do with the coding on the page itself. This setting is contained at the registrar where the site was registered (Network Solutions, GoDaddy, etc.). There you specify the nameservers of your web host.

So, you need to ask your web host what their nameservers are, and then go add that to your account at your registrar.

[jatar_k]

Well Latch, there are a couple of things involved

as MichaelBluejay mentioned, the nameservers route the request to the host and server in question.

There is then a setting in the web server itself that says when someone requests a url to point them to a directory on that server and then, if they haven't specified an actual filename, to look for a file named index.html (for a common example). There may be a list of possible index files as well.

[Stefan]

hi guys when you ftp a site how do you tag the home page to make it appear when the website is typed in?

Not really sure if I follow you, but do you mean how does someone connect with ftp to a website using a browser? If you have ftp accessible on the site, the link is usually to something like ftp://example.org. Then it's anonymous or User/Pw controlled sign-in depending on how things are configured on the server.

For example when I type in www.whatever.com, how does it know to show my home page?

Again, not sure about that. It might just be me and my thick skull. Maybe you could post again and explain the question a little more?

[mack]

This is a system setting on your web host's server. There is really nothing you can do either in code or FTP that will be able to change this.

What your host has the ability to do is determins what type of file can be a homepage, or "directory index", Common examples are index.htm, index.html, index.php and index.cgi There are more examples but those are a few of the common options.

When you built a site you should always use a common directory index as your homepage, this means it will work on almost all servers with no problems.

Is your homepage not showing? if not what have you called your homepage file?

Mack.