The Index Page or Welcome Mat

The main page of any web site is the Index page.  This is like the welcome mat in your home.

When setting up your website this page should be called index.htm or index.html. The webserver will automatically send the file at path /home/yourdomain.com/www/index.htm when a browser specifies http://www.yourdomain.com. When your account is set up, there will normally be an index.html page already installed. This just tells anyone accessing your domain that your site is under construction and will be available soon.

Once you are ready launch simply remove these page and replace it in the www directory with one of your own creation.  You can put an index.html file in any subdirectory that you wish, and it will be the default page served when you don't want your visitors to have to type a full page URL reference, for example, http://www.yourdomain.com/whatever instead of http://www.yourdomain.com/whatever/index.htm, or http://www.yourdomain.com/default.htm.  

By adding an index page to your sub directories this also means that your visitors willl not see a list of files which is quite common with a lot of hosts unless they have Directory browsing Turned off

The index page or welcome mat may take the form of any of the following for a homepage of a directory:

index.htm

index.html

index.php

Some hosting companies allow default.htm and default.html but it is best to check first.

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