Using shop home page as homepage

[AndrewPK]

Righto, time for another one of my questions that seem to be realy difficult but actually have really simple answers

I am currently in the process of moving our site to a new host (currently got domain name with 1and1 and hosting elsewhere) and all is going well,
BUT
when customers enter our web address (www.incredibid.co.uk) i want them to go directly to our online store which is in www.incredibid.co.uk/acatalog/ is there any way of getting actinic to automaticaly place a "index.html" file in the root of incredibid.co.uk which would be a duplicate of the index.html file in the acatalog folder.

I know there is a workaround for this using redirecting pages, (had to do this with the old setup, 1and1 using frames to display our site ) but i dont want to use this method, i just want people to see our store front page when they type the address

note:- our site is still currently live on the old server

[jont]

Against the main menu in the content tree you can rename the main shop page to index.html and then untick "use as website homepage" against the top "home" icon. .. under Design | Options | Misc you can also specify the homepage link

To get users to enter www.site.co.uk and land on www.site.co.uk.acatalog/index.html you will need to use a redirect in the .htaccess or a less favourable way is to place a HTML re-direct into the main root index.html page but that is a big NO NO with SEO practices

[AndrewPK]

Righto, got the website set up like you said, with my store front page set as index.html and no brochure pages and when you go into the http://incredibid.orbit-multimedia.co.uk/acatalog/ it shows the store front yay
but you mentioned changing .htaccess to make http://incredibid.orbit-multimedia.co.uk/ redirect to
http://incredibid.orbit-multimedia.co.uk/acatalog/ where would i find this fabled htaccess file and what do i need to change
also what affect will this have on SEO, i know using html and java redirects are a no no, but will this method have a bad effect

Note:- http://incredibid.orbit-multimedia.co.uk is a temporary domain while we wait for the transfer of www.incredibid.co.uk to complete, once complete the domain will just be, erm, shortend

I thought i had a decent grasp of html etc when i started this now i am not so sure

[pinbrook]

do a search on the forum on the word redirect or 301 or htaccess

this question has been answered by Bill in a diiferent thread already today.

By way of explanation a 301 htaccess direct is fine for SEO

and meta refresh within an html page is not

[jont]

You will probbaly need to create the .htaccess file from scratch. It has been covered on the forum or check out the internet for setting htem up.

A good thread worth looking at is http://community.actinic.com/showthr...light=htaccess which will hepl with the correct rooting from your old to new site and helping to maintain your SEO rankings on the redirect

[jont]

A good online tutorial is available at http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/htaccess/ showing all the commands and how to set the file up in the first place