Works in: Internet Explorer 5

Have you ever wanted users to return to your site? Of course you have—we all want site "stickiness". We want our users to find our site valuable, and we want them to return to our sites often.

You can encourage users to return to your site often be making it easy for them to make your site their browser home page. If you do so, your site will be the first one they see every time they open their browser.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 provides functionality to make it easy for your users to set their home page with just a click. The secret to making this happen is in the following line of code:

this.setHomePage("XXXXXXXX.htm")

The setHomePage method accepts a path and/or a page name to make the appropriate change to their browser. IE will display a conformation dialog box to ensure that the user really wants to do this. If the user selects "Yes" from the confirmation box, the change is made and their new home page is set. If the user selects "No", the change is not made.

There are a couple of things to remember when using this method. First of all, since this is an IE5-specific method, you'll want to check the UserAgent before allowing the user to attempt to execute the method. You can use the following line of code for that:

if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("IE 5")>-1 && 
navigator.platform.indexOf("Win16") == -1) 
{
// It's the correct browser...proceed
}

;Second, you'll want to hide the "Set Home Page" option if the browser does not support that functionality. A simple way is to create a hyperlink "placeholder" in the following way

<a href="" id=makehome></a>   /* Initially, not visible */

newlink = "<a href=setAsDefault2.htm onClick=\"this.style.behavior=
'url(#default#homepage)';"
newlink += "this.setHomePage(new_homepage);\">Set your new home page</a>"
makehome.outerHTML = newlink;

In all, this is a rather easy way to add a bit of convenience and stickiness to your site. It is easy to implement and adds a bit of professionalism to your site.

To see an example in action, go here. You can find the source code for this example here.