What is a Home Page?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | Home Pages

The home page of a website is the web page that you go to when you type in the domain name of the site in the address bar your browser.

The web server will in fact display a file that could be one of several. The server will have been set up to look for a number of different possible home pages and will display the first one it finds.

For example it may look for the file index.HTML and if it doesn't find that one look for home.HTML instead. If it doesn't find that one it may look for index.HTM and so on.

The pages it will look for are set up as part of the server software set up process. Generally potential home page or default page file names are ranked so that the server looks for the relevant file in a particular order and stops looking once it finds one on the list.

If no page is found then one of two things may happen. You may see a list of files displayed in the home directory or folder on the website. Alternatively you might see a 404 page error message.

Generally webmasters like to stop people from viewing directories on their sites and so they create directories with the no-list option. This stops people from being able to see and access all the files in a directory, something that can be desirable if you store information online and want to restrict who can see it.