Tuesday, January 11th, 2005, 1:13 am
Portal DIY
Filed under: It is surprising to see that portals such as Yahoo are still being used. What’s even more surprising is that many people’s entry point (and only central point of navigation) remained Google. Some people have extensive bookmarks (Favorites in M¥¢ro$o£t terminology) which are most frequently used.
Nevertheless, one of the most efficient and convenient ways to browse is from a personal portal — one which you create yourself. My portal consists of about 200 links, sub-divided into some 30 categories. They all reside on the same page so that they are only a single click away. With tabbed browsing, this becomes a crucial factor.
At the top of the page, I choose to have a snapshot of the weather, a clock, and basic search facilities for this site and the World Wide Web.
For good fit of a large number of links, I use 3 columns. Their aggregated width fits all browsers and screen resolutions.
Here are a few extra bits that are worth mentioning:
- Put usernames or numbers below links for quick copy-and-paste.
- Set up keyboard accelerators using the
accesskeyattribute. - Group similar links under the same heading and use a hierarchy of header levels.
Also see: Portal Zen Garden
