If you are a non-techy kind of person then name your home page either index.html or index.htm and skip the rest of this article. That should work 99% of the time for you.

Still here…?

Okay, let’s start by saying that for the most part it doesn’t matter which combination of default, index, html, or htm you use. These are just settings on the web server and can be modified.

Default and Index are the two common default directory documents. Meaning that if you don’t tell the server specifically what web page to load, it will check that directory to see if one of those two files exist and load it.

IE If your default document is index.html and you type http://www.dwkickstart.com it will load http://www.dwkickstart.com/index.html.

Note: If you ever go to a website and you get a listing of all the files in the directory and no web page, this is because they didn’t create a file to match the default directory settings AND they don’t have the privacy settings enabled. This is BAD by the way. You don’t want people to be able to scan your directory structure.

If for some reason you need to see what that setting is, it is usually the DirectoryIndex directive in httpd.conf on *nix machines and the “Enable Default Document” option of IIS.

Sometimes you can change this setting via your web control panel (plesk, cPanel) but usually you won’t have access and will have to get your hosting provider involved if you need them changed.

Note: Since this directive accepts multiple default documents, from a performance standpoint you would want to use whatever the first file in the directive is set to.

Now for “html” versus. “htm”, this is one of those things that technical purists like to argue about. I would guess the people that get uptight about “htm” files are the same people that go to a Star Trek convention and complain the doors in episode III, scene II were labeled incorrectly.

Either is fine…really… just use whatever you been using. If you want me to choose for you, then choose “html”. The “htm” extension is a holdover from back when some operating systems were limited to the 8.3 naming convention.

We didn’t even discuss extensions like “php”, “asp”, and “shtml”, so there is obviously much more you could research on this… but this falls into the “meh, who cares” category.

::ToddS
DW Kickstart - Learn to build and market your own website