Most of us have at least a handful of sites we surf every day for news, business updates, weather, and so on. Personalized start pages are a simple yet elegant concept that lets you aggregate all of that information into a single customized page that appears when you launch your browser. The layout, content, and look and feel of your start page make it your most useful Web destination―at least in theory. A good concept, however, is only the beginning. The tricky part is making it work. To help you find the best personal start page options, we had a group of testers put five leading sites―AOL, Excite, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo!―through a set of real-world tests. Each of our 50 evaluators tackled the same tasks on one of the sites. The objective was to sign up for a personalized start page; to add elements such as stock quotes, weather forecasts, local news, and links to other sites; and to rearrange the layout of those elements or delete them.
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