Dragging the page to the top of the list won’t change its filename to index.html. That filename is the only reason why the “top” page is the home page. The position in the list doesn’t have anything to do with it.
The convention of using index.html to mean “the page that you load when the user doesn’t specify anything besides the bare domain name” is something that the Apache Web server standardized on, and other servers have followed suit. I can say with 90% conviction that it will work on all servers, but if it doesn’t for you, then ask your hosting provider what they require. Microsoft IIS hosts will want default.htm, but even those can be given index.html and be happy in most cases.
Freeway helpfully names the first file you create in a site index.html, and then any other pages in the same folder are named for the title you first give them {with spaces and punctuation removed).
Note that in the Inspector there are two fields in the first tab that appear to affect the filename (the only part of this that actually means anything to the server): Title (the human-readable label that appears in the browser tab), and File: (the filename, which is what you want to change). So when making these changes, always use the File field.
If you make this change in your site in Freeway, though, it won’t necessarily work the way you want it to. Freeway maintains an object reference to the actual page object when it creates links to pages, so if you rename the original index.html to index-old.html, all of the links to that page will change to follow suit. Anyone who visits your newly-rechristened home page at index.html will see the new home page, but the moment they click on any of the links in your site that are meant to go back to “home”, they will go back to your old home page, at index-old.html or whatever.
What I would recommend is to use an SFTP application like Transmit or CyberDuck to rename the files directly on your server for testing purposes. In your server listing in the SFTP application, locate the original index.html and rename it index-old.html, then locate my-new-home-page.html and rename it to index.html.
After testing, reverse this set of steps, and make sure to name the new home page to exactly what it was named by Freeway, so that when you upload from within Freeway, it will remove that file after it becomes the new home page.
Follow these steps in Freeway to permanently replace the original home page “cleanly”.
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Control-click on your existing home page in the left-hand page list and choose Delete from the contextual menu. Freeway will helpfully ask you if you want to replace references to this page with links. Agree to this.
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Click on your new home page and use the first tab of the Page Inspector to change the File field to read
index.html. -
Publish and upload. This should replace all links to the “old” home page with the new one.
Walter
On Nov 18, 2018, at 4:15 PM, Harold Appel via freewaytalk email@hidden wrote:
The link is to my website is as it is now. I want to try out a different homepage so as to use responsive navigation rather than the existing buttons on the home page. Is it OK to make a second test homepage and just drag it to the top of the list for a test and then put it back second to return to the present site?
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