The convention on most web servers is to name all HTML files with a ".html" file extension.  Windows web editing programs like Microsoft® FrontPage® 2000 usually default to the ".htm" extension, which is the convention for a Windows NT web server. Your ".htm" files will still work on a Unix system, but it's more professional-looking to use the ".html" extension, and files named that way also work fine on a local Windows machine.

In one particular case you must use the .html extension, and that's for your home page -" index.html." Unless you use that exact file name, you won't be able to use the shorthand address or URL for your web site: "http://www.yourdomain.com".

Note: failing to name your home page with the full "index .html" name and four-letter extension is the primary cause for people seeing our temporary "Under Construction" page instead of their new home page, when they first publish files to the server.

Q. Should I use Upper Case or Lower Case?

UNIX servers are *case sensitive*, but Windows is not. This can cause problems if you're not careful. For example, if you create a file called "MyWebsite.html" on your local machine, you can use either "MyWebsite.html" or "mywebsite.html" as a link in your HTML file, and Windows will feed the correct file to the web browser. Unix is much more literal. It will interpret those as two different files, and you'll get an error message if you reference it as "mywebsite.html." Therefore, we recommend that all filenames and all directory names in your web site use lower case only. Mixed case will work, but you have to be very careful. If you use lower case for everything it reduces the chance of errors.

Q.  Can I put a space in file names?

Web Servers can handle long filenames and long file extensions, but will not accept spaces as part of a filename. If you have a file named "my web site.html" on a Mac or Windows system, it will work on your local drive but the links will break after upload.  So, before uploading, go through your web site and make sure that you don't have any filenames with spaces. The easiest way to fix them is to replace spaces with dashes or underlines.

If you follow these two rules: all-lowercase filenames and directories, and no spaces in filenames, then whatever works on your local system will also work on our remote server after you Publish or FTP the files to the server.