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And how does one go about getting the server to recognise, say, homepage.html as the homepage? thanks in advance
That is simple just rename your
homepage.html to
index.html unless the default for a server has been highly tweaked all servers look for an index (either htm or html or php) and that is the HOMEPAGE.
If you look at a large website structure there will be many folders or directories that offer different content. each directory will have an index.htm or index html, or perhaps index.php which is the first page the server looks for, there has to be some sort of standard and it has been decided that index is just fine for the purpose of letting servers know what to start out with, unless the server is told otherwise to find homepage.htm or whatever it will automatically show you the index.(extension) when going to the page. See below for a bettr explaination:
type http:www.astahost.com/ into your address bar and then watch the browser you will notice that the page will come back with the home page, then just for the fun of it add to the address above index.php so it looks like
http://www.astahost.com/index.php then refresh the page, and then refresh the page. It comes back the same as when you typed in just the domain without the index.php because the server found an index and added it and servered it.
You can go to any site and leave off the index.(extension) and it will show you the HOME page because it will look for an index. Hope that helps clear your query up.
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