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Introduction

When you go to http://www.computertim.com, you are actually calling up the root homepage. The actual page you are requesting is: http://www.computertim.com/index.html. Either URL will bring you to the same page, but it's often more convenient to have just the URL or folder name, without the page name.

Default Folder Page

Each folder on a web server has a default page. For example, when you type: http://www.computertim.com/howto into your browser, you are calling the index.htm page. When you go to: http://www.computertim.com/y, you are calling the index.htm page in the "y" directory on computertim.com.

You usually can't change the default homepage for each folder; this is set up by your web host. On UNIX servers, the default page is usually index.html, index.htm, index.asp, index.cgi, index.php, and several others. On Microsoft Windows NT/2000 servers, the default homepage is usually default.htm, default.html, default.asp, default.php, and several others. The most commonly used web server is UNIX, so your default folder homepage is probably one of the "index.*" variants.

What are the advantages of creating a default folder page? It's simply for a better user experience. For example, would you prefer to type in http://www.computertim.com/howto/howto.htm or http://www.computertim.com/howto to go to the How-To Articles homepage?

We recommend that you create an index.htm (or default.htm) in each directory of your web site. Some visitors will just type in the folder name after your URL and expect to go to some page. If needed, you can code the page to redirect the user to the proper homepage. (For example, when you go to: http://www.computertim.com/howto, the index.htm page redirects you to howto.htm, which redirects you to howto.shtml, the current How-To Articles homepage.)

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