How do you replace index.html as your "home page".

It's a fail point because the default browser behavior is to look for an index file, which now doesn't exist. If something funky happens, it doesn't read your .htaccess file, etc, it won't load anything and the user might never come back to your site, cause they think nothing is there.

Instead of redirecting to a page name other than index, I'd use the same rewrite rules you would use to clean a URL, to add the "/welcome" part to it.

You are aware that by default, when a browser loads an index page, it doesn't append the "index" part to the web URL. It's kinda like having a freebie clean URL for that index page.

If you used rewrite rules to add your "/welcome" to the URL of the index file, if the browser didn't read or somehow ignored your .htaccess file, your website still loads without the "/welcome" on the URL. Much better scenario than it just not finding your web page at all.

Instead of explain it, this article http://support.tigertech.net/index-file-names makes it pretty simple. I'm curious though as to why you don't want to use index as the file name? You're adding another potential fail point here. You reason to do this should be a strong one.

Hi Kevin, thanks for the quick reply.

Two reasons really.

1. I don't want the url to display "index". I'd prefer "welcome". So www.mywebsite.com/welcome

2. I'm executing php on that file as the user first comes onto the site, so I would need it to have a .php extension. But I plan to use the tutorial here to rewrite those, to keep the url's clean.

Potential fail point? What do you mean exactly?

Nicely put. Makes a lot of sense and assuming you are accurate in what you saying, I can't see why I wouldn't agree with you.

How exactly can I make that index file capable of using php then?

Can it be an index.php file? Instead of .html, as I'm pretty sure the browser wouldn't be able to read the php then.

Btw, thanks a lot for your help, truly appreciated.

Hi Kevin

Sorry, yes I do know that about the server reading the PHP and displaying only the HTML, CSS, Javascript etc Hence the client side and server side code difference.

Not sure why I put about the browser being able to read Php. However your explanation does help to put things nicely in order of how it all works.

I think you have pretty much answered the question in detail.

Thanks

I moved onto more advanced areas of php pretty quick and joining it with javascript via ajax etc, so I have missed a few of the basics. Hence not even knowing how to upload a website properly ha ha.

I've started looking at c++. Really got into building things since joining Treehouse about 6 months ago and knowing nothing about programming.

Mind me asking how long you have been programming?

Absolutely

Will be exciting to see where it all goes in years to come and what programmers are capable of building with new technologies.

You could apply a redirect to your code - instead of loading up index.php, you can specify a particular page