sdollen, In regards to your question about redirecting to your wordpress installation from your homepage, you don’y need to mess with .htaccess files at all. At least, not if I’m understanding you correctly. My site https://www.gamingbliss.net redirects to https://www.gamingbliss.net/wordpress for an example. It’s simple html. On the html file that you want to redirect to another (in my case “index.html”) simply include the following code between your <head> and </head> tags.
<meta HTTP-EQUIV=”REFRESH” content=”0; url=https://www.yoursite.com/blog”>
Replace “www.yoursite.com/blog” with the URL of your blog and you’ll be good to go. If you want to delay the redirection (perhaps you have a splash screen you’re including this on and would like to automatically redirect in 10 seconds if the user doesn’t click a link on their own first) simply change “content=0” to “content=x” where x is the number of seconds to wait before redirecting to your blog.
