Bookmark websites as thumbnail images

Tidy Favorites works with most of the popular web browsers, so load yours (we’re using Internet Explorer), click once in the address line and type www.tidyfavorites.com and press Return. Alternatively you could click on the 'Tidy Favorites' link in the intro to this Workshop. When the website loads, have a quick look at the introductory video and then click the green button to download the free version. If Windows displays a security warning, ignore it and click Save, then choose where to download the program -­ we’re going for the Windows Desktop ­ and click Save again.

Double-click on the Tidy Favorites install icon on the Desktop and then follow the instructions to install the program. Ignore any Windows’ security warnings by clicking the Run button, choosing ‘Install standard version’ when asked and then selecting the relevant browser ­ we’re choosing Internet Explorer, but it works with the Firefox and Opera web browsers as well. When the installation’s done, just click the Finish button to load the selected web browser and Tidy Favorites together.

The Tidy Favorites website has some helpful advice on what to do if the new Tidy Favorites icons aren’t visible. However, in most cases this won’t be necessary: usually what happens is that they’ve been installed but are hidden off the page. Fix this by right-clicking on the toolbar and choosing Lock the Toolbars. Then click and drag the button bar to the left and the two new icons will appear ­ load Tidy Favorites by clicking the globe/star button.

And here’s Tidy Favorites as it first appears in Internet Explorer, having already added a selection of the sites we visit most often from our Favorites list. To visit any site, click on the thumbnail and it will open in a new browser tab. For now we just want to get rid of one of these to make a bit of space so we can make the others larger. Hover the mouse pointer over one of the thumbnails and a set of icons will appear ­ click the ‘x’ to delete it.

Click Yes to confirm the deletion, then spend a bit of time rearranging any remaining bookmarks. To move a thumbnail, just click on it with the pointer and then drag it into a new position. Any of the thumbnails too small to see clearly? Grab the bottom right-hand corner with the pointer again and drag out and down to increase the size. Here we’ve rearranged several different bookmarks and increased the size of the one for the Computeractive website.

Adding new web pages to Tidy Favorites is easy. Open a new tab in the web browser and find an interesting page. Then click the first of the two Tidy Favorites buttons on the button bar ­ the one with a globe and a ‘+’ sign on it. Add a few more sites in the same way and then switch back to the Tidy Favorites tab to see the result. The websites we’ve just added have been placed in a stack in the panel on the right of the page.

The stack is useful for those websites that need bookmarking temporarily -­ to keep them permanently, drag and drop them into the main window, then rearrange the others to make room. If space is at a bit of a premium, Tidy Favorites can help by only displaying part of a website in the thumbnail. For example, with the BBC site we mainly keep an eye on the weather report. So we can move the mouse pointer over the thumbnail and click the scissors icon.

With the scissors icon clicked, it’s now possible to use the mouse to move the website around inside the frame until the bit we want is displayed. After that, use the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in until the weather occupies the entire frame. Use this technique for news feeds, weather reports, online music players and other sites where you’re only interested in displaying a specific section or feature to save space. Click the scissors icon again to finish.

Tidy Favorites also supports bottom tabs (like Excel) and folders. To create a new tab, right-click anywhere next to the existing Top Links tab and choose Add Tab; ours is called ‘Stuff to watch’. Then we can bookmark websites about upcoming films and our favourite TV shows and drag them from the stack into the main window. Next, we right-click in the window and choose Create Folder and then give the folder a name,­ for example, TV Shows.

Create another new folder called Films in the same way and then drag the film and TV show bookmarks into the appropriate folders. Here for example we’ve copied websites about Lost, Mad Men and Joss (Buffy) Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse, into the TV Shows folder and the other two sites (which were for the new Terminator film and The Hobbit) into the Films folder; tabs and folders make it easy to keep lots of bookmarks neatly organised without losing the visuals that make Tidy Favorites so appealing.