Lesson 3: Customizing
Course Sessions
This section will help you understand common terms and tools of the internet: Making Text Larger, Changing Home Page, Changing Colors.
The Internet can be overwhelming. Yet with all its vastness, the Internet has one very endearing quality. The way you view and use the Internet can be customized to suit your needs. Your Internet browser is very flexible and enables you to customize many different settings.
Some of the most noticeable features of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are the Toolbars. You can easily remove the Internet Explorer Toolbars from your screen. You can also customize any or all of the Toolbars by adding and/or remove buttons, changing the size of the Toolbar buttons, and even changing the order in which they appear across the top of your screen.
Internet Explorer 5 has three Toolbars that normally appear on the screen — the Standard Buttons, the Address Bar, and the Links Toolbar. When you click on View from the Menu at the top of the screen and choose Toolbars, a checkmark will appear in front of the Toolbars that are currently being shown.
Checkmarks in Front of View Toolbar
Click the Toolbar name to remove the checkmark and subsequently remove the Toolbar from the screen. To reinstate the Toolbar, simply choose Menu and View again and click on the name of the Toolbar again.
The Toolbars themselves can also be customized. You can reposition buttons to suit your taste, add new buttons, or remove buttons that you don't use. Just right-click the Toolbar and then click Customize.
Making Text Larger
Some Web pages are difficult to read with perfect vision and almost impossible to read with aging eyes. When Web page designers create Web pages, they often specify particular type (font) faces, colors, sizes, and background colors. Each item on a Web page has to have a designation. There is usually a style sheet that contains information about the type of styles that appear throughout a Web page or site.
Once again, the surfer has the ultimate say. Isn't this customizing feature great? You can override many of the settings on the style sheet. This override capability is especially helpful to those with limited or low vision. Users can specify their favorite font and color preferences. If you find that the size type on a certain page is just too small to read comfortably, change it using the text size options available under the “View” category of your browser menu.
Changing Home Page
As we saw in the early stages of Learn the Internet, your home page is the page that appears every time your browser is opened. Many times before computer manufacturers ship a computer, they will designate their company page as the home page of that computer. Often, when you add software from your Internet Service Provider, their software will change your home page to be a page about their services. In these situations, you may "inherit" a home page that is not your choice. Now that Learn the Internet has helped you become more computer savvy, let's change that home page to one of your choosing.
It is a good idea to choose a home page that you want to view frequently or one that provides easy access to valuable information such as the AARP site. You can easily make the AARP Web site your own home page.
Changing Colors
Showing Visited and Unvisited Colors
You can customize some of the colors that are used on a Web page. One of the most useful color changes is customizing what is called a hover color. Previously, you learned about a hyperlink being indicated by a different text color. I also explained that when you hold your mouse above a hyperlink, the cursor changes to the hand icon. Holding your mouse over a link in this manner is called hovering. Thanks to customizing, you can change the text color of a hyperlink when your mouse is hovering over it. I find this very useful because it is now easier to see the links. While this may sound a little complicated, it's not. Watch me demonstrate:
By default, unvisited text hyperlinks are blue. Once you have visited a Web site, that text color changes to burgundy. You can also customize these colors. Just follow the same procedure shown in the multi-media on changing the hover color. Click on Tools and choose Internet Options. When the dialogue box appears, change the colors of the visited and unvisited hyperlinks.
