Also, when i am saving a website in xara on my own computer, does the site need to be named index...i see that index always pops up as a suggested name.
No you can name it anything you like but you need to remember that pointing a link to a folder, whether the root folder or not the browser will look for index.htm or index.html

So if you're going to name the landing page other than index.htm you need to ensure the link points towards that htm file. Rather than www.mysite.com/subfolder/ it points towards www.mysite.com/subfolder/whatevername.htm