Choosing a Home Page for Safari

You may have noticed that the iPhone version of Safari does not have an option to specify a home page, though the popular option exists on Mac and PC versions of the Safari (and for that matter, every other web browser in common use today). Instead, when you tap the Safari icon, you return to the last site you visited.

The trick to having Safari open to the page of your choosing rather than to the last page you visited is to create an icon for the page you want to use as your home page. This technique is called creating a web clip of a web page. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the web page you want to use as your home page and tap the action button (shown in the margin).

2. Tap the Add to Home Screen button.

The Add to Home screen appears.

3. (Optional) Change the name of the icon if you like.

4. Tap Add.

An icon that will open this page appears on your Home screen (or one of your Home screens if you have more than one).

5. Tap this new web clip icon instead of the Safari icon, and Safari opens to your home page instead of the last page you visited.

You can even rearrange the icons so that your home page icon, instead of or in addition to the Safari icon, appears in the dock, as shown in Figure 19-3.

See the tip in Chapter 1 for rearranging icons if you’ve forgotten how. And consider moving the Safari icon from the dock onto one of your Home screens so that you never tap it by accident. If you like, place both Safari and your new web clip icon in the dock so that you can tap either one depending upon your needs.

Figure 19-3: The B.L. Dot Com icon now replaces the Safari icon in the dock (between Mail and Music on the dock).