Either I have ADD or a very short fuse because I have no patience waiting to load websites or applications off my computer. I always wanted to have a dashboard on my screen that would take me in a fraction of a second to all these resources. That day has come.

The following is a very sweet and short tutorial where you can setup your internet browser home page to your liking; where you can have all these applications just 1 click away instead of 3 or 4.

Here’s how my homepage looks like:

You can do this 2 ways:

• Quick & Dirty using Word (download template here)
• Using a program like Dreamweaver (if you are comfortable with coding web pages)

This article will describe the first method. Here are some preliminary steps, necessary before you actually construct the home page:

Preliminary Step 1: Make an inventory with all the logos of all the websites and applications you use the most. Make sure you crop them to a maximum of 200 x 200 pixels. That’s what mine are.
Preliminary Step 2: Create a folder on your computer and call it “Homepage”. This is where you will store the home webpage. Create another folder under this directory and call it “images”. Save all the image files of your favorite websites and applications under the “images” directory.

Now let’s delve into the meat of the matter:
Step 1: Open Word and Click ‘New”. Setup your margins to 1 all around (you might get a message saying that Word needs to have a very small margin even if you selected 0. That’s OK – just accept whatever Word wants). Setup the “Page Orientation” to “Landscape”.
Step 2: Insert a table with 5 columns and 4 rows. The top row will house the categories. I established “Business”, “Social Media”, “Email”, Resources” and “News”. Of course, yours might be different.
Step 3: Click inside Column1, Row 2 and insert your first image related to business. Let’s say it’s your login page of your blog or maybe your company’s website.
Step 4: Highlight the image and click “Insert / Hyperlink”. Fill in the information as seen below:

Step 5: Continue with all the other images. If you have an application or a specific file you want to create a link to just navigate through “Start / Computer” and find the file. Copy the path and then switch to your Word document and past it in the “Address” field for the “Hyperlink”.
Step 6: Once you finished save the file as a “Web Page” under the “Homepage” directory you created in the Preliminary Step 2 like so:

Call it “My Home Page” or whatever you want and presto! You got yourself a customized dashboard. All you have left is to actually tell your browser where to find that page. Read on to find out how to do it:
Step 7: Go back to the “Computer” and find the path to the file you just created. Copy the path, switch to your web browser.
Step 8: Click on “Settings” and then “Internet Options”. Under the “General” tab the first field is “Home”. Past the path in that field and click “Apply” to save your new settings.

That’s it! If you don’t feel like going through the whole Word setup thing, just download the template here and feel free to modify it any way you want. Let me know how it goes and if I can help in any way; I am curious to see how your dashboards look like cause I’m loving mine.

 Claudiu Geanta is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Design by Satori Inc. & Satori CG Inc.. He helps businesses promote their presence on and off line. He is also an accomplished web designer, book writer and photographer. You can follow him on Twitter.
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