When it comes to dreaming up new projects at the home-front, don’t overlook one very important resource ... the very place you are reading this story or the World Wide Web! Using the Internet and World Wide Web can either be one of the most informative experiences one can have or the most frustrating depending on your approach.

You could take the lost traveler approach and flounder around the web jumping from web site to web site finding nothing of value or you could take the approach of a farmer planting his crops. You have to prepare the soil before you can plant the seeds, then plant what you want to grow, then maintain the environment by weeding and keeping it free from wildlife and insects all before you get to harvest the final crop. It’s the same for using the World Wide Web. If you just throw out some seeds - jump around to web sites hoping for results - you might get a plant here and there but only by accident.

Rather, one should take the careful farmer approach ... results are guaranteed! First, utilize search engines properly to find sites of interest to you. A search engine is a tool that looks very quickly over the net to find results matching a search pattern. The way it works is by keywords. That’s why a search using the short and sweet words “landscaping projects” producing far better results than a long sentence like “I want to plant a garden in the yard and put flowers there”.

Proper use of search engines is the first step to producing usable results much like preparing the soil of your garden before planting. And don’t stop with just one, there’s a plethora of search engines available on the web.Yahoo.com is one of the original search engines and offers great results but there are others like Dogpile.com, FindArticles.com and InfoJump.com and all of them might produce different results depending on how they are designed. After you prepare your soil, you need to plant the seeds for future use.

The way you do that is when you find a site of interest, you don’t have to go over it all right away. Just bookmark or favorite the site and you can return to it anytime. To bookmark or name a favorite site just click on the Favorites drop-down menu on Explorer or Bookmarks menu on Navigator. After you add the sites of interest to your library of favorites, it’s then time to maintain your garden of information.

Make separate folders for putting specific topics into for easy retrieval later and rename bookmarks with ambiguous titles with ones you’ll remember later. They’ll still take you to the same spot, but you might know where you’re going. By carefully following the same procedure at the desktop you follow in the garden, you’ll have plenty of resources growing on your home computer whenever you need to harvest them.