I do something similar to what you're trying to do. I compose my own HTML start page, which has a navigation bar on the left, and it contains a lot of input fields for things like my favorite search engines. It also has a few strange features that other people might not understand, but which I find incredibly useful:

- Fedex and UPS tracking fields. Each time I use them, it saves the field contents as a cookie, so that the next time I boot up the system I merely have to click on the field once, and *pop* there's the last tracking number. (Because I am obsessive about checking and re-checking for a package to arrive.)

- A guitar key/capo transposition tool. I put in a few chords, such as Am D G, and a capo level, such as 5, and out pops the new chord chord forms at that capo level (in this case Em A D).