Problems with htaccess redirects

Hello,

I have a problem that I’ve been struggling with for some time. We are using a theme for WordPress that does not allow us to set a home page – it is done automatically in the theme.

We are trying to use Google Web Optimizer to do split testing on some landing pages. Since we are not able to use the homepage of the theme, we are using three html files for the landing pages. The idea is the user will see this initial page, and either go to the thank you page ( the Coversion page) or go to the site itself.

To do this, I wanted to make sure that the landing page is the first thing they see. Inside of my .htaccess file, I added “DirectoryIndex first.html”. This had the desired effect of ensuring that a visitor to the site would see the landing page (and as an added bonus, worked with Google Web Optimizer). However, when I did this, I was not able to login to WordPress. It gave an error when I went to the wp-admin page.

Next, I tried to edit the .htaccess to say “DirectoryIndex first.html index.php”. This allowed me to have the landing page come first as I want, and also allowed us to log in to make edits. Unfortunately, whenever we tried to visit another page on the site (ie domain.com/otherpage), it would just take us back to the first.html page again.

I’m stuck. Could someone please tell me what I’m doing wrong?