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Creating a Homepage

Creating a homepage in the dotCMS using the templates provided in the starter site installation, or in one of our accelerator editions, is detailed below and is quite easy.  However, if you wish to create a completely customized custom template and a set of custom containers for your HTML page, please see the tutorial on how to Create a Customized Web Page.

The default homepage in any Host on a dotCMS installation is the "index" page that lies in the "home" folder on that host.  Index is a special page URL that indicates that the HTML page is the default page that will be displayed when the URL of that directory is visited directly. 

For instance, visiting the localhost/home directory directly in the URL will redirect automatically to the index page that exists in the home folder.  Each folder that has HTML pages in it (that are meant to be reached by a browser), should have an index page in that folder.

To create a homepage on a new Host, simply right-click on the host and select "Add Folder".  Name the folder "Home" and select the "Show On Menu" checkbox to allow the home directory to appear in the navigation menus on your site.  Now the index page needs to be created for the "Home" directory.

To create the index page in the home folder, simply right-click the "Home" folder, select "New", and then select "HTML Page".  On the HTML page Basic Properties window, type "Home" as your "Page/Menu Title" but change the URL to "index".  Then choose a Template from the drop down menu that suits the design of your homepage and click on the "save and publish" button.

As long as the DNS records for the localhost are pointed at the dotCMS server you should be able to reach your new homepage through the following URL:  http://localhost/home  See your System Administrator concerning your website's DNS information.

For information on how to add content to the homepage of your site, please see the Add New Content to an HTML Page documentation section.