Member Avatar for rikkie

Hi,

I am in the process of building my first website (no coding experience) My home page (saved as .aspx) uses asp.net controls. All other pages are saved as .html. I can navigate fine from the home page to any of the other pages; however when I try to navigate from the .html page to the home page, the home page just does not load.

It works fine if I change the .html pages to .aspx. Is this the only way to resolve this problem?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by rikkie

Dani AI

Generated

Short answer: the problem is the preview environment, not ASP.NET or your links. Expression Web will often open pages directly from disk (the browser shows a file:// URL) so server-side pages like .aspx are never processed. On a real web server (or when you uploaded) the ASP.NET runtime runs and everything works, which explains the behavior you reported.

Fixes you can apply now:

  • Set up a local web server and preview via HTTP. On Windows that means enabling IIS or installing IIS Express, point a site/virtual directory at your project folder (or copy the site into C:\inetpub\wwwroot) and browse to http://localhost/YourSite/Home.aspx. Expression Web will then preview the page the same way your production server does.
  • For quick checks, open the server URL directly in your browser rather than using the file preview inside EW.
  • If you must preview from disk, use relative links that resolve under file:// (for example href="Default.aspx" or href="../Default.aspx"). Avoid root-leading links like href="/Default.aspx" when testing from the file system.

Troubleshooting tips: look at the browser address bar — file:// vs http:// immediately tells you whether the page is being served. If a direct http://localhost/.../home.aspx opens correctly, the issue was the preview method. As noted, navigation between .html and .aspx works fine when the files are served; , your EW preview was just not running ASP.NET locally.

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Member Avatar for Cragdo

Hi,

You should have no problems navigating from an html to aspx and vice versa. You should post your code in your post so that some one can have a look to see where you might have gone wrong.

Cheers

commented: Lightning quick response! Like it. +2
Member Avatar for rikkie

Hi,

You should have no problems navigating from an html to aspx and vice versa. You should post your code in your post so that some one can have a look to see where you might have gone wrong.

Cheers

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply. I am using Expression Web to develop the site and it seems to be a problem only when I preview the site using EW from a page other than the home page. I’ve uploaded to the web server and can’t seem to replicate this problem from there.

Thanks again.

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