Advice on Site Organization

I have a new site that is operating, however will not be mature enough to submit for several weeks. Being a "newbie", I placed my site home page well down a directory tree. This is know "known" by many users and has appeared on printed materials (i.e. hard to change and will be around for a long time).

Some sites that want to point to me have a problem with the length of my URL. Ideally, I'd like to add a second entry point with a shorter URL and eventually attrophy the old entry over time. The discussion in these support pages makes me think that I might be inadvertantly be creating "doorway" pages that are generally frowned upon by the ODP editors and policies. I'd be greatful for any guidance.

My problem is: existing entry point is something like:

myserver.com/......<several subdirectory terms>.../homepage.html

I want to keep this but add a new entry page like

myserver.com/homepage.html

and keep both active.

Eventually, I will add a version of the site in a non-english language. Will this also act as a doorway page?

TIA

We strongly prefer to list just the root URL and that's what you should submit once the site is ready to be released into the wild. The editor might choose to additionally list a deeplink but don't hold your breath .

some freindly advice

What i would do is make a new homepage - usually it is named index.html in the root directory. This way servers will automatically look for the index file when someone types ion your domain name.
eg. if someone types in myserver.com the server will usually by default get myserver.com/index.html that should be your home page.
First - make a copy of your deep existing homepage and name it index.html in your root directory.
Fix all the links so that your old homepage is 'orphaned' nothing links to it from your webste.
Second - leave your old 'orphaned' homepage on your server with a 'redirect' to your new homepage. - remember your website does not link to this 'orphaned' page. But this page points to your new homepage.
Third - start using your new homepage for submissions etc. If anyone happens to end up at your 'orphaned' old homepage they will be redirected to the new one. Also put a robots noindex,nofollow on this redirect page. Eventually the old page will get dropped from the search engines, when the traffic gets to '0' and this page is no longer used then it can simply be removed.
This is only my humble opinion. I would like to hear from some editors on this one. Because thats what I did (not for index page ) but it seems a valid use of 'redirect' to me.