"Default" Pages in MS FrontPage

[Rich.Harrington at co.hennepin.mn.us]

I hope someone on Web4Lib can help me out.  Can anyone tell me if it's true
that in MS FrontPage you can only safely have one page with the name of the
Web server's "default" file name?  Here are the details:

                               *  *  *  *  *

   The county government I work for has one Webmaster; you send her the
stuff you want on your departmental Web page, and she marks it up using MS
FrontPage and uploads it to the server.  I had recently redesigned our Web
page, and it was to be placed in its own directory on the County's Web
server.

   The Webmaster finished recently, and told me our home page would have an
address like this:

     http://www.co.hennepin.mn.us/lawlibrary/lawlib.htm

with the file name at the end.  For simplicity's sake, I would prefer not
to have a file name at the end, and I asked if lawlib.htm could be renamed
to the server's deault file name (welcome.html), so we could give our
address like this:

     http://www.co.hennepin.mn.us/lawlibrary/

   I received the following response:

     RE:  default page.  You're pretty much right in your 9/26 e-mail.
     However,
     we're using FrontPage, which will only let me set one name for a
     default page
     (no matter what directory), which is Welcome, as you noted.  If I name
     any
     other pages "Welcome" (no matter what directory), I run the risk of
     having my
     root web default page replaced when I move files/directories around
     with
     FrontPage.  Believe me, it happened the first week of September -- the
     wrong
     default page was public for 12 hours before somebody let me know and I
     had to
     reconstruct the Welcome.html page.  It was a valuable and hard to
     forget
     lesson. I can understand why you'd like it set up that way, but I
     would really
     rather stay safe than sorry.  Hope you'll understand.

   I guess my question basically is, Does this make sense?  Is there
anything she should be  doing differently (e.g., settings in FrontPage) to
give subdirectories "default" file names without jeopardizing the County's
main Web page?

   Thanks for any information at all.

Rich Harrington
Hennepin County Law Library
Minneapolis, MN
rich.harrington at co.hennepin.mn.us