I spend a lot of time on the computer, and almost all of it is online. Its the nature of my business. Every day, I start out by checking up on all of PC Media’s websites, the forums, email, etc. Then I chck out the news on DrudgeReport.com. But, there are many sites I use very often, including all of my online banking accounts, client websites, various administrative systems, etc. Obviously, remembering all the site address is impossible. And using the browser’s bookmarks is an option, but then you have to click around and browse through folders until you find it.

All browsers allow you to specify your own homepage. Many people just leave it set to a default location, or they specify their favorite website (PC Mechanic, of course). Some people leave it blank, which is pretty useless but it does allow the broswer to launch quicker. But, you can also specify a local HTML file on your own hard drive, and what’s more, you can customize this local HTML file however you wish. Pull out a webpage editing program such as Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or whatever you like to use (people who don’t know HTML will find these WYSIWYG options attractive), design a homepage that is personalized to you and has links to all the places you go quite often. You can even put the logins you may require to those websites right in the HTML - nobody else is going to see this page, so its up to you. Save the page to your harddrive and then set it as your homepage in your browser.

This saves me a lot of time.

For those who are a little more advanced, you can customize your page to do many things. Use javascript, or even server-side languages like PHP (if your PC is set up to run them), and you can do all kinds of creative things.