I want to

Wonderpage

Visual & Social bookmarking tool It's a start page by any other name. However, as the description suggests, it's a very visual resource with a grid of pages. I'll be sticking with Netvibes though.

TizzR; a home page designed for children

From the site: "TizzR Is The Personalized Web Space And Homepage Which Can Be Customized By Adding Your Favourite Websites , Search Engines , And Emails As Well As Choosing Your Favourite Colour Schemes And Social Networking Sites To Use From One Page In One Place." (Guys, seriously - lose the Caps On Every Word. You're not hip and down with the kids you look sad and pathetic.)

Anyway, apparently children don't want news, weather and stuff like that. They want to know what their friends are doing, personal news and so on. Which is why they'll go to Facebook and won't come here. I love start pages, but really, this just isn't in the running.

Blinkdash

Blinkdash Just love this one, I don't think. They have a nice little page that slags off other search engines; "The truth about other start pages: Here's a secret. Most start pages are efficient at getting you where you DON'T want to go." No, actually... most good start pages are very good at getting data to come to you so you don't have to go anywhere else. This thing is so basic it's worse than useless. Avoid like the plague.

WebNavigo.com Start Page - Your Personal Home Page

WebNavigo "is a graphic version of your favorites sites. Make your own start page with favorite places on the web. Instead of typing web address, you can click and go to your favorite pages. Sign up and your settings will be accessible from any computer connected to the Internet."

To be honest, I've seen so many of these things they're getting really old now. This has nothing in particular to recommend it, but it's there, so now we know.

YourPort

MEET YOUR NEW HOMEPAGE  Bringing all your favorite sites together in one place. Why use Yourport as my homepage?  Automatically sync to your own bookmarks. No login or sign-up needed. Share your favorite sites with friends. Its Free to us. Very basic, with large button icons. 

Internet buttons

If you have a friend or relation who is not too up on using the net, or you wanted to create a really simple home or start page for someone, try Internet Buttons. Very simple - choose the link, choose the buttons and choose a URL. Point friend/relation to 'their' page and it makes life easier for them.

They are quite big, bright and clunky. Great for children, though not perhaps for colleagues, but to be honest, if they need to use something like this, they have bigger problems.

Go into Edit, choose a URL for the button, call it whatever you like...

Choose the colour, add it to your collection

Save and you're done. Nice and simple. Thanks to Jo Brodie for the headsup on this one.

 

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SymbalooEDU

Start page for schools. This is an interesting twist on their existing start page offering, which I've blogged previously. They now have version optimized for teachers, allowing school branding, customised content, webinar training, with a maximum number of of users. It's also free of any advertising.

Woolik

The latest start page to come my way is Woolik which looks quite attractive. You can resize everything, add in your own backgrounds and move all the widgets around. I didn't see an option to add in your own sites however, just to choose from a pre-selected list. If that's not right they need to change their introductory video! If that IS right, then they need to add that as a function immediately since a start page isn't credible until you can do that. If you're after style rather than substance, this is a nice looking one, but I wonder at their abilities, particularly since the title of the site is 'Landing', which doesn't encourage confidence.

Webwag

Another in the start page category is Webwag which looks painfully like Netvibes. Lets you create you create your own content, tags and so on, and will populate a page automatically for you. Looks nice and simple, possibly more attractive than Netvibes itself in fact. But I'm still not moving.

schmedley

I'm a great fan of start pages and schmedley is a nice looking version. Lots of options, plenty of widgets that you can move around, you can add new tabs and so on. It does look as though some advertising is forced on you though, which is a shame, and it's one of the reasons that I'll be sticking with Netvibes.