I was under the impression if you used absolute paths then they would work regardless of where they were located. Here's my .htaccess file: (Apache 2.2.x) RewriteEngine On # Force leading www. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.(.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/dev/$1 [R=301,L] # SEO friendly URLs. RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ index.php?p=$1&e=$2&k=$3 [L] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?p=$1 [QSA,L] Code (markup): I'm working in the /dev/ folder which is why I have that in the "www" rewrite rule. So the problem now is everything works except it's not loading the CSS file or images. I can only assume apache is doing some rewrite to the CSS file but I'm not sure how to fix this correctly. It would be crazy if I had to write a specific "skip this file" rule for every css/image/js/etc. file. Also not sure how to modify my rewrite rule to only rewrite index.php (I thought it was doing this already but apparently not?). All of my links are absolute. http://www.mysite.com/dev/css/base.css etc.