If you’ve ever considered buying a domain name for the primary purpose of creating a custom email address such as your-name@your-domain.com, this tutorial from Ask Leo! is just what you need. In it, Leo Notenboom explains domain registration, email forwarding, and using a free email service (such as Gmail) with your custom domain.
If you’ve never created a personalized homepage, or custom start-up page for your browser, there are a lot to choose from. My personal favorite is iGoogle but Pageflakes looks interesting too. A custom homepages is a place to gather all the news, feeds, email, gadgets, widgets and apps that are important to you, to give you a single place to start your web sessions from. For a closer look at fourteen different homepage services, read Mashable.