OT: What is the point of a start/home page (was: bling bing blingetty bing)

JimK added nothing worthwhile to the conversation so I'd though I send a nothing worthwhile submission back that no one else would notice.

Failed.

I've got thunderbird set up to here to mark as read, and kill sub-threads on a few plonked respondents. For them it's not worth wondering worrying if the sub-thread goes back on thread. It doesn't.

I remember when saving bytes mattered, (We were all on 2400baud dial up at a premium rate) and tricks would be used to store a background which faded from one colour at the top to a different colour at the bottom (Or side to side) in just 2 bytes with a few dozen bytes of html coding. Nowadays, they make the bitmap in full 24 bit per pixel colour using photoshop to match the largest screen size they've heard of and send that instead.

Traditionally home pages were small so they loaded very fast. On dial-up or a very slow broadband (that some people still have) you could at least tell if was worth visiting the rest of the site which may have been more bandwidth intensive.

Then along came those with medja study qualifications who "designed" home pages with flash content so that you need to download 100Gbytes of information just to press the enter button.

Not terribly useful to my customers though :-)

On 21/07/2014 19:03, John Williamson wrote: ...

I remember upgrading to one of those from 1200/75 :-)

Perhaps they should include in the studies that you have about eight seconds to capture a casual visitor and keep them on your site.

In article ,

In message , Tim Streater writes

My home page has been with me ever since I first learned basic HTML years ago. A simple page with a list of URLs for the sites I most often visit - BBC news and weather, eBay, Amazon, various forums etc. Loads in fractions of a second.

Its called a favourites toolbar..

"designed"

And once the 100 GB of flash has downloaded you either have to wait for it to run it's course as there is no "skip" button. This is a serious PITA if this page is a central navigation one. You can't hop back and click on.

Or you don't have flash and can't get any further into the site as there is non non-flash option. Sometimes you can look at the source code and deduce a URL and if that works the only bit of flash in the whole site is on the landing page.

Yep, waits longer than about that either get people clicking again or leaving. Like wise levels no more than 3 deep unless there is proper reliable crumb trail.

My home page is on my HDD and contains links to all my favourite sites.

A lot of them, like one I used to have on the history of English money, were to give information on things that are now covered in Wikipedia.

Indeed, but it is all too easy to keep adding to the toolbar until such time as the buttons are tiny, and scroll off to the right. Easier, for me, to have a few toolbar buttons for common requirements, and the rest as a list of links on a home page which appears every time a new tab is opened. YMMV.

oh? doesn't your favourites bar have files of sites so top level buttons are kept to what you can display OK?

Firefox doesn't let those buttons get too small before moving to the side favourites menu. Easy to drag and drop the favourites into any order you want too. I have an add on which allows you to arrange them in alphabetical order with one click, and then drag and drop the ones you want most to the tool bar. Which only needs doing once in a while as your preferences change.

Also, if one wants to use multiple browsers, it's easier to maintain a local offline links page (I keep mine in a Dropbox folder so it's accessible on all my machines) and then just put a link to it into the toolbars in each browser.

In message , Jeremy Nicoll - news posts writes

Agreed. I use multiple browsers on two PCs, so, using the same home page in each case, I know exactly where everything is. Doubtless there are other/better ways, but my way works for me.