HELP with asp (please)

changing default.asp to index.html

[girliebob]

Hello People!

Having never coded in asp (all of my sites are hand coded html) I am not really sure what I am doing, but I hope you can answer my question.

Here goes:

I have just taken over the task of updating the website of a record shop as the person who designed it hadn't a clue about SEO, and so the site has very little traffic. What I would like to do is to change the index page from being an .asp page (called default.asp) to being a html page which you click "ENTER" and it takes you to the page that is the index at present. How do I do this? Can I just make an index.html page and put the "ENTER" link as default.asp? or is it more complex than this?

Any help is appreciated.

[ajavaly]

You just have to make sure the asp page doesn't have any actual asp code in it! If not, then it is that simple. But I'm not sure why they would've set up their index page as an asp if they had no need to write server-side code. Hope this helps.

[girliebob]

I don't quite follow. The person who designed the site doesn't have a clue about anything but how to work Dreamweaver so the website looks good but doesn't work as it should as it has no visitors (the owner compared it to having a Rolls Royce but no keys!). What I need to know is how to add an index page to the site so that it will be the first page someone sees when they type the URL of the site, and not what is there now (the current index page is named 'default.asp').

[defanjos]

Why don't you simply change the content of default.asp?

You can do anything to it that you can to index.htm
You don't need Dreamweaver to change it. Simply use any HTML editor you want.

[girliebob]

I am changing it. But as it is a shop, it is difficult to put any keyword rich content on there, but if I could add a page before it, then that could have the logo on it, plus and <ENTER> link, and a paragraph describing the contents of the website (this is what many record shops do).

[dotme]

I think IIS defaults are to serve default.htm before default.asp as the default document.

So try creating your new home page and name it default.htm

Go to the root url with your browser (without specifying a page name) and see what page IIS serves you, your new .htm page or the old .asp page

If the IIS server is set to serve default.asp first, then you should rename the existing default.asp to home.asp, for example. Then name your new index page default.asp

If there's no asp code, there's no load on the server - and most spiders don't treat simple asp pages without url params any differently than .htm or .html pages.

Hope this helps!

JD

[mattglet]

To prioritize what documents get served up first (default.htm vs. default.asp), you can change the order in IIS. In the Default Documents tab, just use the up/down arrows to change the order of the pages. You can also add your own page to the list, and have it show up first.

[Macro]

The problem with webmasters is that they think everybody is a webmaster ;)

If you don't have IIS access or, like me, think IIS is some sort of cruise ship, then you can

1. save a copy of default.asp as new-page.asp
2. redirect default.asp to any new htm page you create using a redirect tag in the header - say "index.htm"
I'd use <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=index.htm">
3. Have a link on "index.htm" saying "click here" and on clicking it takes one to new-page.asp.

So user goes to yoursite.com/, and he hits the default.asp page which is a blank page that redirects him to index.htm. And he clicks on the link in index.htm to get to new-page.asp (which is a copy of the old default.asp).

That's my low tech solution. But I may have understood the question incorrectly in which case forgive me as I'm not a webmaster (or a webmistress. I'm kinda lika wannabe).