my home page has disappeared

installed wordpress and.......

[naija_doc]

Hi. I built my site with dreamweaver in plain html with a css stylesheet. it looked a bit boring and i wanted an easy way to just put up my articles and just go, seeing as i won't have much time to fiddle around in the immediate future. So i installed wordpress on my server thru fantastico. When i type in my site on google for example, what comes up is the page from the wordpress installation. How do i change this? I dont have many visitors (200 last month up from 40 the month before) but i would like to display my old home page until i transfer all my pages to run on wordpress. Help! Don't know a thing about php and after battling with html and css I'd really like to just work on content for now. Feedback appreciated. Thanks.

[goodroi]

it doesn't sound like the problem is with google. it sounds like you are having problems with wordpress. if you are transfering significant amount of old content into wordpress you should find someone who is good with mysql and php to help you. if wordpress is fully installed & working properly than google should be able to index and cache you properly. let me know if i misunderstood you.

cheers

[Pibs]

If you've installed Wordpress then you've installed what is basically a stand-alone website, so your index or 'home' page is now Wordpress.

As I imagine it's php rather than html then you probably haven't over-written the old one and all your old site content should still be on the server, just not accessible because you no longer access the html homepage by your domain.

How do you upload your data? If using a conventional FTP program you should be able to see the files.

If you asked me what happens if you have an index.php and an index.html page I wouldn't know - but it looks like you've answered it yourself, the domain defaults to the index.php page.

I'm not sure what the best workaround would be. I'd imagine there's some kind of re-direct thingy you could do. "301" sounds familiar but no idea how to do one.

Alternatively delete Wordpress and reinstall on a subdomain, transfer everything to it and then copy over to the main directory - but that depends on how Wordpress works. You may then have to manually change lots of links, though hopefully it uses "/" rather than your domain with internal links.

For example a page called 'page1' should, hopefully, be '/page1.php'

not 'mysubdomain.mydomain.com/page1.php'

Because then you'd have to change em all again. Might be no great trouble but if it's using links internally in the script it could be a nightmare to move it. So try a Google or something on 'moving a Wordpress site', see what's involved?

You'll also need, if going this route, a hosting provider that allows subdomains. Some do, some don't, some charge a small fee.

Another alternative is to creat a new directory, which is basically the same thing but looks more like

mydomain/new-directory/index.php

but that has the problem of being spiderable by search engines and can screw up your SERPS a little when changing over, but no biggie if you're just doing it while uploading content in the short term.

But primarily, the problem is Wordpress is a website, not a blog within your site unless you carefully set it up like that.

P.

[Pibs]

Reading through my own post it may not be entirely clear what I meant - the reason I suggest installing Wordpress in it's own directory or on a subdomain is simply so you can upload your content and tweak it until you like it. Once happy, THEN move it to the main root directory of the domain.

I still have no idea why a browser is picking index.php instead of index.html but I guess it can't show both and for some reason is going with the newer one.

P.

[tedster]

The browser is not where that decision is made -- it's in the server configuration.

[Pibs]

OK, but how would he change that?

P

[tedster]

Your suggestion about separate folders may be the most practical, Pibs -- especially because the original poster may not have admin level access to the server.

As I understand it, servers have a list of which files to look for as the index when only the directory name is requested. The list works in order of preference. In this case it sounds like index.php is earlier on the list than index.html and needs to move down below it. But if this is shared hosting rather than dedicated, that change could affect all domains on the server.

However, it seems to me that having index.php higher on the list than index.html is pretty unusual. How about going in via FTP and seeing if the index.html is still there? It may have been deleted during the install, so replacing it could fix everything.