Changing the index page for my store

[sorcha]

Not sure if the title of this thread explains this properly but what I want to do is this.
I have two websites, homewares and furniture, but I want to make the main page of one of these sites an options page for the two sites so when you put in my web address i.e www.tomsheehy.com a page will appear which says click here for furniture and click here for homewares.
Any tips would be appreciated as I am a real beginner with this.
Thanks in advance.

[stevesh]

Create your page with links to your sites (which would be in subdirectories, like /housewares and /furniture), and name it index.html. Then place it in the root of your site (www .tomsheehy.com).

[schoolboy]

If Search Engine ranking is important to you for your main domain, there are some considerations regarding this approach...

Google particularly, won't consider a page with 2 links on it (and nothing else) as being the least bit important, and will totally ignore it.

[sorcha]

Thanks schoolboy. I had not considered this. Is there any way around this?
The problem I'm having at the moment is that when I set up the redirect, i.e. .../index.html, I cannot access any of the rest of thes site. Everything is being redirected, not just the main page. I'm guessing that the only way to avoid this is to put my main website into a subdirectory, but I really don't fancy doing this.
Any suggestions would be helpful.

[sorcha]

Just as an addition to the previous, would I be better off just creating a popup on the main page of the original furniture website? e.g. please click here to see homewares website. This might bypass the problems with google indexing the site.

[schoolboy]

Unless your HTML site plays a critical role in your eBusiness, I would suggest you MOVE all your static content into your ZC site, and dispense with the HTML site completely.

Keeping everything in ZC is done for many good reasons.

You can use EZpages to hold static content, and through XML sitemaps, you can alert the search engines to their presence.

Also... if your HTML pages are duplicating content that is in your ZC installation, you will get penalised by the SE's.

What is your main reason for wanting to retain a flat HTML site? They are very hard work to manage, and hardly anyone whose doing eComm uses flat HTML sites anymore.