meta refresh or other option?

I'm working on a English/Spanish-language site. We will have essentially mirrored content in both languages. We've decided to have the site default to the English-language version of the site. We could have done a "splash" page and given the user the option, but we'd like to start off with offering content, and not forcing our users to click and wait more than they already have to. The majority of our audience are English-speakers, so we felt like that was the best way to go. Each page will contain a button with access to the other language version of the site.

In order to keep the site organized for the current web team, future web team, and users, we're separating all content into separate directories (/eng for english, and /esp for spanish.). Since we want the page to default to the english version, ourdomain.org/eng, what is the best way to acheive this? I don't want to move the english index.html to the root, because I'd like to keep everything identical between the two versions of the site. I could use a meta refresh tag with a 0 value, which would theoretically refresh to the /eng directory with a very minimal delay. I seem to remember seeing something somewhere about setting some value on the server to essentially do the same thing--directing requests to ourdomain.org to ourdomain.org/eng without an extra html page to load. I would prefer to use something along those lines if possible.

Does someone know what I'm talking about? I can use meta refresh to start, but I'd like to move to the other way that I'm describing if possible.

Our host (Verio) doesn't offer the standard control panel that you'll see with a lot of hosts, but I'm sure it's something that could be accomplished if I just knew what to do.

Any ideas? Thanks

 

 

 

 

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