“I’m very flattered that you’d want to ask me this. I do like you, but not in the way you were hoping for. I’m sorry.”

Somewhere in time you have said this to a web page. Despite being extremely helpful there are times when a web page wants more than a working relationship with you, and wants to make it personal.

I was under the impression that the Internet was starting to evolve into something better, yet I was checking a few websites through some Google searches on a university computer (explaining why it’s IE and not the far-superior Firefox) and a fairly modern website threw this up at me.

Realistically, in this day and age, who on Earth would want to make your page their home page?! If I were to receive an email from a reader of my Blog telling me that they had made my website their home page I would recommend them to either one of these websites:

• Bloglines: The best online RSS Feed Reader on the Internet
• Google: The home page of the majority of users (other search engines are available).
• Google News: Find out what’s going on in the world.

In all seriousness, unless you’re the developer for a very large/popular/useful website that receives hundreds of thousands of visitors per day there is very little chance of anyone wanting to add your website as their home page. Even if there are users that want to there is no way they’re going to want a pop-up to automagically appear from a link or just by visiting the website to ask them. The best thing you can do to encourage a visitor to do this is to add a guide showing your visitors how they would add it themselves, perhaps with a link there if your users are in no way technologically oriented.

If you’re a budding Web Designer/Developer and you’re reading this then please never force this situation onto a user. It breaks the rythmn of a web page and is only likely to share off the users that you’ve managed to get there.