Website redirecting on a Hosting Plan
Using Meta Refresh Tags on your LCN.com hosting
So what are they and why would I use one?
Meta refresh tags or Meta tag Redirects are a method of instructing a web browser to automatically refresh the current web page, after a given time interval, to another web page
This is particularly handy for LCN.com customers who have website hosting plans, but just need to set up a simple redirect to an existing web page. Why do you ask is this necessary? Customers who simply register domain names, have the use of our free web and e-mail forwarding facilities. For those who take the plunge of actually directly developing on those domains by purchasing a hosting plan, the free facilities are immediately overwritten/by-passed in favour of the hosting server. Some customers may obviously not be aware of this, and will try to pick up their old website through redirection. When you initially take up a hosting plan, your domain will display and a standard holding page, this is naturally overwritten when you upload your own website.
The aim of this blog article is to provide a method to those customers who may not yet be ready with a website to upload or a presence on their domain name, but may have a webpage on the Internet they would like their domains to point to in the mean time.
The Basics
To create a Meta refresh tag, we advise all customers to simply create a new index.html page. This is simply to be uploaded/created in the appropriate web folder where your domain picks up your homepage. This is particular handy, as you can then work on your own website whilst the redirect is in place, just be sure not to name your work in progress ‘index.html’ as that may well overwrite the redirect you have active.
This page only needs to consist of the actual redirect script. It is advisable, if you currently have a website on your hosting and wish to use a redirect, that you change your current website homepage name from index.html to something different. I tend to simply call my homepage (when I am not actively using it) to something similar that I can easily find from the folder list, i.e. index2.html or something similar. Simply adding a number in the filename will tell our system not to pick up this file as the homepage default – so lets keep things simple for now.
Should you wish to disable the redirect at any stage and pick up your website again, a simple reversal of the above is needed. You can rename your redirect file from index.html to index3.html and you can then rename your original homepage file from index2.html back to index.html. The ability to rename file names can be accomplished either on your computer (though say file manager/My computer) or you can make the changes through an FTP client such as Filezilla (by clicking on the files in question and renaming them).
The creation of your Redirect Script
Creating the Meta refresh tag can be accomplished through Notepad (or anything similar).
The script itself is very simple and only comprises of 3 instructions. These have been broken down for explanation, but will make more sense when put together.
- The meta element for http-equiv=”refresh” instructs the webpage to reload
- content=”0 instructs that after the page is reloaded, how long it takes to implement the redirect. For example, if content = 5, the redirect would wait 5 seconds before executing
- url=http:// This is the instruction of where the redirect will take you. It can be any URL, and does not necessarily have to be a landing or holding page, it can be a subpage! For example,
http://www.google.co.uk/page6.html
An example meta refresh tag can be seen below.
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.google.co.uk” />
The above meta refresh tag will immediately redirect website requests (for the website this is placed on) to the webpage displayed on Google’s website for www.google.co.uk
I suggest if you are going to try this yourself, you use an FTP client such as Filezilla to drag and drop your handiwork into the relevant web folder (Filezilla will also allow you to rename the files easily). I suggest reading this other article on the use of FTP, if this too is something of a grey area:
http://www.lcn.com/blog/2009/10/ftp-uploading-made-easy/
