newbie questions about homepage url

[speedwaycruiser]

After feeling confident using notepad to make a few basic foundation pages, I signed up at bluehost. I am having trouble grasping the different ways a page can be found and typed in the addess bar. My site is nicktritt.com with just one index.html in the "public_html" folder (just a basic homepage.) My question is, Is it possible to have my site come up by typing www.nicktritt.com as well as http://nicktritt.com? I can only see my site with http://nicktritt.com right now. Also, when I press the home button, am I able to not have the "index.html" at the end of the url and have a plain www.nicktritt.com homepage? I am just a bit confused on how the beginnings and endings of url's effect the pages. Can anyone recommend any good sites or forums for this as info well? Thanks so much, Forgive Me!!

[silentcollision]

Your site should appear perfectly, and identically with, and without the "www.". It does for me, anyway. What browser / OS are you using?

With your index.html vs root question, I'm not entirely sure what your asking. Does it actually matter? You can set it to both index.html, or your root folder (nicktritt.com), and both will work properly.

[speedwaycruiser]

I'm using windows xp media center and internet explorer. I still can't see my page with just www.nicktritt.com only http://nicktritt.com. As far as the index.html vs. root, I am literally brand new to getting a page hosted. HTML is not my problem, its everything after that. I have been learning as much as I can from faqs, forums, sites, etc... Not having the index.html on the end is just a possible preference I suppose. I just wondered why when you visit the page the first time there is no index.html and when you go "Home" it is in the URL.

[Frusis]

Hey there,

I'll start by saying that both http://nicktritt.com and http://www.nicktritt.com work for me. :)

When a browser loads a web folder, it searches for a file to load. The first file it looks for is called index.html. This is a standard convention built into web browsers.

Thus, as your homepage is called index.html and is located in the root folder of your website, it can be reached by either nicktritt.com or nicktritt.com/index.html

http://nicktritt.com/index.html directly links to the homepage file.

http://nicktritt.com links to the root directory folder. Your browser then searches for a file to load... which happens to be index.html

Both options have the same result...

Hope that helps,
Jamie Tarling
http://lostdreamers.net/blog

[troy]

Frusis said it the way it is,
also Im useing the same system as you and I see the page both ways.

[speedwaycruiser]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad it's working for everyone else. Still, when I throw in those www's, I get the bluehost default page as if I don't have an index and haven't deleted default.html (obviously I have.) Same if I do nicktritt and the hot keys ctrl + enter. I did try to install wordpress both manually and with fantastico several times (before I started the tread) but I kept getting errors when I tried to access it. I thought I got the fantastico install to work correctly once but as far as I could tell it made my blog the homepage, even though the last time I installed it, I put it in a seperate folder labeled "blog" and not in public_html. I have since uninstalled the new users, db's and all word press components (I hope.) I didn't think this would effect anything, could this be my problem? And is there a way to know what files are the default files that you get with a clean bluehost account, or a master reset/wipe if some files are accidently deleted/modified/added? (I don't know if some of that's possible.) I just wonder if I have a wordpress file hanging out in there. I would love it if I knew for sure I had a clean "server?" before trying to get wordpress in there for www.nicktritt.com/blog (which I have not made yet). :confused:

[Nick Manley]

When a browser loads a web folder, it searches for a file to load. The first file it looks for is called index.html. This is a standard convention built into web browsers.

I'm really sorry to nitpick, lol. I'm a stickler for correctness. The setting that determines what file to look for by default is actually specified by the server. I could have home.html be the default instead of index.html if I changed some settings on the server. Although using index is pretty much the univeral standard and default on most web server applications such as Apache.