Creating an Index Page for a Subsite

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes you already know the following:

1. Logging in to CommonSpot
2. Creating Pages in CommonSpot
   

Website Files & Folders

Websites are made of files and folders accessible by the public.

Asking For a File (Page)

Let's look at the following URL:

http://stlouis-mo.gov/news-media/press-releases.cfm

When you go to this URL, you are requesting the file (page) "press-releases.cfm" inside the folder "news-media."

What Happens When We Don't Specify a File?

Now let's use the following URL:

http://stlouis-mo.gov/news-media/

The above URL requests the "news-media" folder, but doesn't say which file you want. So how does it know what to show you?

Index Pages

Index pages come up by default when a user goes to a folder and does not ask for a specific file.

When you ask for:

http://stlouis-mo.gov/news-media/

The website assumes you want the file "index.cfm" inside the folder "news-media."

This means that going to the above URL is exactly the same as going to:

http://stlouis-mo.gov/news-media/index.cfm

Creating an Index Page

Creating an index page is exactly the same as creating any other page in CommonSpot, with one exception:

1. Page Name: The page name (in the standard properties) must be "index".

That's it! Follow the instructions for creating a new page, but instead of creating a name from the page title, use "index" instead.

If you already have a page that you would like to turn into an index page, rename the page to "index" by going to Actions >> Rename Page.