Displaying a short URL for a website - html

Question

I am not clear on how to frame my question. I am making the website for my college fest, and although I know HTML, CSS, I don't know anything of PHP. I just want to display my URLs like this:-
www.somesite.com/somepage (something like that)
instead of :-
www.somesite.com/somepage/index.html
How do I do that? Thanks for any help. I am new to all this
edit: I have tried something like this, just removed the constraint-
<script>
setTimeout (function () {
if (typeof history.pushState === "function") {
var width = window.innerWidth || screen.width;
if (width < 768) {
history.pushState(null, null, "/short-url");
}
}
}, 10 );
</script>
Didn't work. The console gave an error "Failed to load resource" for a lot of files.

Answer 1

What you are looking for is called URL Rewriting. If you have an access to the .htaccess file
you can define some rewrite rules in it, for example:
RewriteEngine On # Turn on the rewriting engine
RewriteRule ^www.somesite.com/somepage/?$ www.somesite.com/somepage/index.html [NC,L]
The first part is the address the user will enter and the second part is the actual address he will be referring to, the third part is an array that contains some flags regarding the rewriting.
NC - the rule should be case-insensitive
L - don't process any more rules if this one is used
Note that you don't have to use the full URL, for example:
RewriteRule ^blog/first-post/?$ /blog/posts/myFirstPost.html [NC,L]
Here's a nice beginners guide.

Answer 2

The answer depends on a particular web server configuration. Usually request url corresponds to a particular directory path relative to site root directory. Some web servers allow to omit such resource names as index.hml, index.php in request url. They will associate implicitly /some/path with /some/path/index.html.
See link

Answer 3

You will want to have a directory structure similar to this:
website/
├── blog
│   └── index.php
├── contact
│   └── index.php
├── index.php
├── projects
│   └── index.php
└── resume
└── index.php
where within each folder (these being the different sections of your website), you have the .php or .html files being named index.extension. This will give you the desired effect.

Answer 4

A really easy and silly way would be to encompass the url you want in an anchor tag and have the anchor tag point to the url you want. for example:
www.somewebsite.com/webpage
Also, depending on the server's OS (I know this is true for apache because it's what I learned on), you don't need to explicitly indicate index.html, it'll load the index of the directory automatically. In some cases, if you exclude the trailing / as you did with www.somesite.com/somepage then it'll redirect to www.somesite.com/somepage/. This happened with my school's website and I don't think they've fixed it.