Force specific page upon access?

[MDee]

Hey everybody,
I recently took my old XP desktop and made the jump to a Linux kernel Centos distribution for a personal webserver. Everything's working great, although I still have a lot to learn...which leads me to my question! I'd like to force all accesses to my domain to go to a specific page. So if a user tried to go to www.mydomain.com/foobar or www.mydomain.com/bankaccounts.html or anything like that it would redirect all of those to a page of my choosing. I tried placing the line
'redirect 301 / http://www.mydomain.com/' in a .htaccess file in the root dir of my server, but this caused an infinite looping of redirects (or so firefox and chrome claimed). Can anybody help me out with this?
Thanks!
-Mark