In this article you are going to learn how to drag and drop website shortcuts onto the Windows desktop and then how to manage these shortcuts into a neat and easy-to-get-at shortcut toolbar.
It's easy to drag a shortcut off the browser onto the desktop. You can then position the shortcut on your desktop wherever you want and open it with a double-click to launch the browser with the website URL ready loaded. For many sites, this will make the whole process seem almost instantaneous.
To start, load the page you want in your browser so that you can also see your desktop. Then position the mouse cursor on the icon for the website (it's is just before the URL shown in the address bar). As you do this, the cursor changes to a 'hand' and a 'tooltip' message appears to confirm the action you are about to take. If the website does not have its own icon use the icon produced by Windows (it's like a page of text with the top right edge folded over in a triangle).
Now, with the cursor on the icon, hold down the left mouse button and drag the icon off the browser, keeping the button held down, onto a blank area of the desktop and let go. As soon as you do this a larger version of the icon will appear on the desktop with the shortcut arrow in the bottom left hand corner.
Obviously, having done this once you can do it again with another site and build up a bank of easily accessed websites from the desktop.
This is great but once you have more than a few of these they look unsightly and the time is right to create a special toolbar to house them. This toolbar is easy to make and lives on the taskbar to the left of the clock and so provides easy access to your favourite sites. Once opened, internet shortcuts can be activated with a simple single-click which makes the operation both quick and intuitive.
To create the toolbar, first open 'My Documents' from the Start menu ('Documents' in Vista) and right-click on a blank area in the right hand pane, selecting 'New' and then 'Folder' and naming it 'IS' (for Internet Shortcuts).
Open this folder by double-clicking it and position it and your browser (which has the site you want loaded) so that you can see both the address bar and the new folder.
Just as you did before, position the mouse cursor on the icon of the website, but this time drag it from the browser straight onto a blank area of the folder where it will create a shortcut. If you wish, you can right-click this shortcut and rename it to something simpler or more meaningful.
Add any other websites you want and you will soon have a folder containing a selection of web shortcuts. Now it is time to move this folder to the taskbar.
Close all open programs and right-click an empty area of the taskbar and, from the resulting menu, choose 'Toolbars'. With this menu open, position the cursor on the word 'Toolbars' and choose the bottom entry called 'New Toolbar'.
This will open a new dialog and in it you can navigate to your 'My Documents' folder. Once there, find the 'IS' toolbar folder that we created earlier and select it. Now choose 'Select Folder' at the bottom and you are done. On the taskbar will appear a new toolbar called 'IS'.
Open this toolbar by clicking on it and you will have all your websites ready and just a click away. Now a single click will open any of the shortcuts.
To delete a shortcut, simply open 'My Documents' and then the 'IS' folder, select the site you want to remove and press the 'delete' key and the shortcut will disappear from the folder and the toolbar.
You have now created an easy and simple way to hold websites that you want to access regularly.
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