You can replace Apple's Homepage home page templates with one of your own. I've been doing just that since I first signed up with .Mac, and it's quite easy. I'll talk about what you need and give you step-by-step instructions.

If you've got a .Mac account you've got a couple of choices as to what you want your visitors to see when they first visit your Homepage. You can select from one of Apple's templates or you can create anything you want with an HTML editor. By way of example, here's what my .Mac's homepage looks like right now.

What you need:

.Mac account
HTML editor (preferably WYSIWYG)

In order to get .Mac to "see" your new homepage, you will place an HTML file, named index.html, in your iDisk > Sites folder. That will override your current Hompage default home page (which is usually named MenuX.htm, where X represents a number). In order to "change" your current Homepage home page, you will not need to delete any existing files in your iDisk > Sites folder.



Here's a step by step guide to swapping out Apple's template Homepage for one of your own design:

Tip: Before you begin, navigate to your current .Mac Homepage. If you plan to use individual links to these pages on your new home page, copy and paste all of the URLs in your site. If you only copy one, make it the first URL in your location bar when you arrive at your Hompage. That's your current home page, and it will be the page updated when you add a new page using .Mac Homepage. The URL should look like this:



Two points here. First, any number can follow Menu in the URL. That's just how .Mac keeps track of your current Homepage revisions.

Also note that the "Menu12.html" acts sort of like your site map. This is important if you want easy access to all of the existing pages in your Homepage. You can copy and paste each URL into your new site as individual html links as described, or you can simply link to the original Homepage, which is what I did. See it here. Click on "homepage menu" and you'll see what had been my original Homepage.

1) Create a home page in an HTML editor.

2) Create a folder for your page's images on your iDisk:

iDisk > Sites >



3) Save your home page to your iDisk as "index.html" (lowercase):

iDisk > Sites

4) Test out your new Homepage home page. All you need is the following URL (you don't need to add "index.html" to the end of the URL):



If it's not working, (1) make sure you've put the "index.html" file in your Site folder, (2) make sure it's formatted in lowercase, (3) and that the URL you're using is formatted like the URL above, where you replace "cherrypop" with your .Mac login name sans @mac.com.

TIP: When updating your page, simply open the index.html file on your iDisk. Don't forget to save regular backups of that file just in case you make a change you don't like.

Stay tuned, in a week or two I'll show you how to register a domain and forward it to your .Mac account. 


Thanks for reading this how-to. If you found it helpful, consider a donation (link at right).


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