How to Create a Business Dashboard Homepage

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael and welcome to a video edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Max.

Max's question is, "Hey Evan, I was taking a look at the tools you use and was wondering what program you use to create your homepage that you load for the internet. You show a pic but don't tell how you did it. If it requires programming, I might need my programmer to do it for me, 'But if I could do it myself, that would be best. Max.' So what Max is talking about, on my website I have a list of my favorite tools, and these are a lot of the tools that I use that help save me time and really help grow my business without having to add a lot of manpower. Underneath, if you scroll down, you'll see a lot of different tools that I like to use, and under this section here, Running Your Business, I recommend Save Time by Creating a Homepage Dashboard. I've also included a full picture so you can kind of see a little bit better— on my Facebook page. And this shows you all the different tools that I use on a regular basis, and it saves time by having it all in one spot so that I can have access to everything quickly as I click through my website. So these are the most popular websites that I use on a day-to-day basis to run my business. Some of them you can see are personal, some of them are my key suppliers, business, and then the social media stuff that I'm involved in as well. So what I'm gonna do is show you— if I load a new tab, go to home, this is what's gonna load every time I load up a new browser. I'm gonna show you two quick ways to do it. One is how I actually do it, and I'm gonna also show you an easier method if you're not as technically savvy. Here we go. Okay, so the first method I'm gonna show you is what I actually use to create my homepage dashboard. I use a program called Dreamweaver, and it's a pretty common program that you can use to make really advanced websites, but it's also great for beginners as well. So this is what it looks like. I'll click on my homepage, and editing it is almost like editing a Word document. If you know how to do Word, you can get started with Dreamweaver. So say I want to add something to my homepage, and maybe under Personal I will add in Toronto Dance Salsa, which is where I do a lot of salsa dancing. I can either add a text link like this, I've done that a couple times here, uh, I'll do that if I'm feeling lazy, or I could try to go out and find a picture that would make sense for that website. So say for this one I want to find the logo for Toronto Dance Salsa, I can go to Google Images google.com/images, and I'll type in Toronto Dance Salsa, and here is the logo. So I'll click on that. I will save the picture, and I'll call it Toronto Dance Salsa Inc. There we go. I will go back to my Dreamweaver. I'll make a new line, And then I'll go Insert Image, and let's find it— Toronto Dance Salsa. Okay, and there it is. So I can either make a text link here or the picture link as well. Now we need to actually go get the link, so the link is torontodancesalsa.ca. Here's the website. I'll copy and paste the link, go back to my Dreamweaver. I'll highlight the image, and where it says link, I'll just copy and paste that in. And if I want, over the text, I'll also put the link here. Now, for pictures, you'll see that a blue border's come around that. I tend to find them a little ugly, so all I'll do is click 0 for border, and it gets rid of my border. I will save it. And then if I go back, load my web browser, if I click Home, you'll see that now I've added my image and my text link to Toronto Dance Salsa, and if I click on it, there I am! So once you've gone through the step of adding all the different pictures pictures and text links that you want in to run your business, we have to save the file properly. To do that, you just go File, Save As, and then you name the file whatever. I created a new folder on my computer called Homepage, and then I called it Homepage. You can be more creative if you like, uh, but that's what I did for my own site. Then you'll see there's a file that's run off of my own computer, so this isn't anywhere else on the web for other people to use. It's just stored on my computer. And here's the exact route. So this will change depending on wherever you want to save it, but it's going to be on your own computer. Then when I load up my internet browser, I'm using Chrome in this example, but all the different internet browsers will have an option. From here, I'm just going to click, I'm going to go to my options, and it'll say homepage, open this page, and you can give it the URL. So this is now going to call my new dashboard homepage whenever I load up a new browser. You can see if I go home, there it is. So if you're using Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer, or any of the different browsers, they all have an option to set your default home page, and you want to make that your local file. So you can see here, this is the same extension name that I used when I saved it through Dreamweaver. Okay, so I promised you another way to do it if you don't have Dreamweaver or you don't want to invest the time into learning it. And it's simple and it's through Notepad. So this is really bare bones. You have to know a little bit of HTML, but it's not that complicated. So what I'm gonna do here just to show you, I'm gonna create a new file. I loaded up my Notepad and I'll call it Evan's Cool Resources. And if I wanna make it bigger, I'll just put an H1 in front of it, and I'll close the H1 tag at the end of it. And if I want to link to Toronto Dance Salsa as an example, it's important to know that if you're gonna create a link, it's a href equals the link torontodancesalsa.ca. Then you put in the text that you want to actually show up. So Toronto Dance Salsa, and then close, close that off, okay? So this page is only gonna say Evan's Cool Resources with the H1, so it'll be bigger, and in regular font, we'll show the link to the site, okay? So it's very bare bones. I can go Save As, and I'm gonna put it in the same folder, so Homepage, and I'm gonna call it Home Page 2. And here is important, you want to call it.htm instead of.txt, which is the default. So save it.htm. Okay, and it's been saved. Now if I go to my internet browser, I should be able to click here and put the 2 at the end of it, and here's my site. So Evan School Resources, Toronto Dance Salsa, and if I click on it, that'll now work. If I wanted to add the picture in instead of this text here, a quick way is go image src for source equals, put it in quotes and close that off, and then we have to go find the picture again. So if I just quickly load up my googleimages.com images, find Toronto dance salsa. Find that logo. I'm gonna copy the image URL, and as I go back into my Notepad, I'm gonna paste it in here, and now I'm gonna save it again. Save. Then if I go back to here, I refresh this page, you see it's a picture. And if I load that, There's the website. So you can keep going on and add more links and more pictures until you've made it to your satisfaction and you got a cool list of tools that you use on a regular basis to help save you some time. If I want to then set this page as my default, I would copy that link, I would go back to my options, and then I would here paste the link, and that would be Save it. Then the next time I load my browser, this new page will load instead of the existing one. So hopefully this is an easy way for you to be able to create your own homepage, and if you have any other questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

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