A current project (SBUGuide) I’m currently working on needed an extra boost of inspiration to push deadlines across to our staff. So I decided to create my own start page for the project. I then made all the staff members add that start page as their home pages on their browsers so they would constantly be reminded to do their work. (neat idea by Joey)

This start page consists of three parts which are easy to implement. The first part is inserting your company logo. Users have to know who’s start page they are seeing, it looks more professional and makes the page look a lot nicer.

Second is to including a simple search field so if at anytime, someone wants to use Google or Yahoo to do a search, they can do it right from the start page. It’s essential for any start page to have www search. Also in addition to adding search, it’s good to add other links as well so they are also quickly accessible by your users. Our staff requested Yahoo and Blackboard to be added as links.

The third step, which is exclusive for our project is the calendar by Google. Jobs and deadlines are color coded so our staff can easily organize and know when things are suppose to be done by when . Of course, the calendar is optional for your start page but it is essential to ours.

I will write up a tutorial on how to make your own start page step-by-step.

In the meantime you can check out our hot SBUGuide Start Page!

Let me know what you think.