Changing your default homepage
There is a quick and simple way that you can change the default page that is loaded when you open up a website. For almost every server, the default value is to first look for the index file. On my server it will first look for an index.php file, if that is not found, it will then look for the index.html file and if neither are found, it will just say page cannot be found, or something to that effect.
If you want to change those settings, your can do it with the server files… or a much easier way, especially for a temp page during website construction is to define the default file within the .htaccess file.
Working with the .htaccess file can be tricky at times, depending on what you are wanting to accomplish, but luckily changing the default start page is simple. First you will need to create a .htaccess file within the root directory of you website. Likewise you can create one inside subfolders, and change the default page for a subfolder as well.
Once you have your file created, you must add the following code.
DirectoryIndex filename.html index.cgi index.pl default.htm
Within this code is where you can specify what you want the default page to be. If you only want one option, just specify one file. If you want multiple options as listed, this will first check for the “filename.html” and if not found it will then check the next file “index.cgi” and so on. Upload that .htaccess file to your server and your in business.
I should clarify that this is for a server with an apache web server, usually that is a linux server.
