Australian PC World - Make a local home page

Make a local home page

Tip
The more you can do off-line, before connecting to the Web, the less time you waste and the less you spend on your connection.
When you start your browser, it connects to a Home page, usually set by default to the Web site of the vendor. Connecting to Netscape or Microsoft as a first port-of-call is not always an economical option. You can return to the Home page at any time by clicking the browser Home button.
You can stop the browser from continuing its download by clicking the Stop button or pressing the <Esc> key.
To avoid this unnecessary downloading in future, you can tell the browser to use a blank page as its Home page. In Netscape 2 and above, click Options--General Preferences and click the Appearance tab. In the Startup panel, check the Browser start with Blank Page option.
Even better than a blank page is a local page with something useful on it. You can create one very easily. Just open up Notepad or any other text editor and type the following:
<A HREF ="http://www.infoseek.com">Infoseek</A>
Save the file with a .htm extension. You've just created a Web page, using the HTML language, containing a link to the Infoseek site where you'll find a powerful search engine.
Let's say you saved the file in your C: drives Work directory, with the name home.htm. Now you can tell Netscape to use this file as your home page. In the Netscape Options--General Preference Appearance tab, check the home page location option and in the text box below type:
file:///C|/work/home.htm
Note that there are three forward slashes after file:, that the drive is specifed as C| rather than C:, and that all slashes are forward slashes.
Click OK, then click the Home button. Netscape should display a page just Infoseek on it, highlighted as a link. Click on this link to go to the Infoseek site.
Notice that the Home page loads very quickly, because it's loading at hard disk speed and it contains only a very small amount of text.
You can create links to any site this way. If you want to create a more complex Home page, see our General Q&A section this month for a list of search engines to add to your Home page.
In Internet Explorer 3 and above, you can do the same thing. Internet Explorer shows a blank page if you start it and don't make a connection to the Internet. To set your own home page, choose View--Options and click the Navigation tab. In the Start Page
address, specify the path of your local Web page. The format's different. For the file in the above example, you'd specify the path as:
file:C:\work\home.htm
We've used this very simple example to illustrate the point. You may find it easier to download a page to use as your local home page. You can download a collection of local home page from our PC World Web site at www.idg.com.au/pc.world.
- Neale Morison

Category: Internet
Issue: Oct 1996
Pages: 182