I have several KB's I've created and published over the years, and only have this issue with one. Since I'm moving to a new windows server, i'd love to resolve this issue. On the old server, I always had to type wpahelptest.mot-mobility.com/index.htm to get it to open. I still have to do this, and it's annoying. I can partially solve it, but would love to understand what's wrong and how to resolve.
The first page is named "welcome"
After uploading to the new, I had the same issue. So I added welcome.htm & welcome.html to my IIS default document.
Now, if I enter just wpahelptest.mot-mobility.com, the page opens, but the frame & contents are not here - I have to click on "show"
5
Replies
HI there
This would seem (to me at least) to be a server configuration error. As I understand it, index.htm is a standard and default "starting page" that the server (if properly configured) should simply load up and present.
The bottom line here is that I believe you need to be asking your web folks that are responsible for maintaining the server about the issue. Just explain that you are typing wpahelptest.mot-mobility.com and you have an index.htm but it isn't loading up.
Cheers... Rick 
Hi Rick,
Okay - but does it make sense it works for every other KB, but not this one? I feel like I must have something wrong.
And then when I added welcome.htm, it did show the start page, but not the frame, just as if I had done a right click open URL in a new page. But I have no idea what I've done wrong on this one! Should I rename my start page to index.htm? The old person I worked with told me to name it welcome, but I don't think that should make a difference 
The web recognises certain defaults that don't need to be typed in.
www.mywebsite.com/index.htm only needs www.mywebsite.com to be typed in.
www.mywebsite.com/welcome.htm needs to be entered in full.
There are other words but welcome is not one of them.
I wonder if this is the cause? I would expect it to fail completely rather than as you describe.
There's more at Basics of the Index.html Default Webpage Scroll down to Other Default Page Names in particular.
See www.grainge.org for free RoboHelp and Authoring information.
I got it
When I investigated more in the directory, there were two files named index.htm in the SSL directory, but not in my primary directory. So even though I had specified wolcome.htm, apparently it was confusing things.
I renamed the two index.htm's to index.htm.old, ensured my path was picking up welcome.htm, and all is good! Thank you both for responding. The forum is very lucky to have you both. And now I will go back to lurking... 😉
I think you may be confusing the start page and the default topic. Look at your SSL and you will see one field for the start page and another for your default topic. The start page opens the help and is typically index.htm. Within the help it then displays the default topic alongside the TOC.
There could not be two index.htm files in the same directory. Windows does not allow that. You may have seen index and index1 or suchlike.
See www.grainge.org for free RoboHelp and Authoring information.
AdChoices