Best Ways to Use and Organize Your Website Bookmarks

You're on a website and you want to save it for reference so you click on "Favorites" or "Bookmarks." It's easy to amass a collection of bookmarks. The problem is that if you don't make an effort to organize your bookmarks, it becomes difficult to actually find a site when you want it go back to it; which defeats the purpose of bookmarks in the first place. Once you organize your website bookmarks, you'll see the true value of bookmarking sites in terms of productivity and efficiency.

How Bookmarks Work

When you bookmark a site on your web browser, it goes to the bottom of your bookmark list automatically. The natural order of your bookmarks is the order in which you bookmarked each site. That's it. No organization beyond that. If you leave it like that, you're not likely to be able to find a bookmark when you need it.

Rename Your Bookmarks

The first step in organizing your bookmarks is to clearly name or label each bookmark. When you click on a site to bookmark it, you get a default name. It may be the name of the site, but it's not always something that is instantly recognizable. eBay's site, for example, automatically saves as "Electronics, Cars, Fashion, Collectibles, Coupons and More Online Shopping" with eBay tacked on at the end. That's a mouthful to even read, let alone try and find when in a few seconds. All you need is "eBay," the rest of that stuff is clutter. Keep your bookmark names simple, short, and descriptive.

Use Folders

If you have a lot of bookmarks, use folders to keep things organized. Before you start stuffing sites into folders, think about how you want to organize things. You might want to put all your social sites into one folder, all your shopping sites into another, and all your business contacts into another. Just don't forget to title each folder. Follow the same rule you did when naming your bookmarks and keep fold titles short; "Social," "Financial," "Cooking" and so on.

Sub-folders

You can also make sub-folders within each folder. In "Financial," for instance, you may have "Banking," "PayPal," and "Taxes." For business purposes, you may want to name each folder after another business that you deal with on a regular basis. You may have a folder for "Company XYZ," for example, and break the sub-folders into categories such as "Website," "LinkedIn profile," and so on.

Re-order Your Bookmarks

You have many different choices when it comes to the order you choose for your bookmarks. If you don't have too many bookmarks, going alphabetically may be easier for you. If, however, you have a significant amount - let's say more than 20 - of bookmarks, it might be easier to organize them based on the sites you use most.

Have a Miscellaneous Folder

You are likely to have sites that you want to bookmark for a day or two, but you forget to delete them. Create a "Miscellaneous" or "Temporary" folder where you can stick these sites for the time being. When you start a new week, go into these folders and delete what you don't need anymore or just delete the entire folder if you know that you don't need anything in it.

Clean Out Your Bookmarks

Even if you have perfectly organized our bookmarks, certain bookmarks may become either unnecessary or outdated over time. Set aside a little time to go through the sites you have bookmarked. Delete the sites that you don't use anymore. Check the links for sites you haven't visited recently to ensure that the link is still valid.

Personalizing Your Bookmarks

You can further personalize your bookmarks. Keep sites you use everyday at the top of your bookmarks and not in a folder. This will save you a few clicks, which can make a difference when you're rushing to find a site. Consider creating a folder for each of your social sites and sub-folders for each page or person you visit the most on each of those sites. For "Facebook," for example, you may have the sub-folders titled "Mark C." and "Tammy S." This allows you to quickly get to the desired page faster.

Finally, most bookmark tabs have useful organization tools. Firefox, for instance, has a tab where you can see your most recent bookmarks. This makes it easy to delete sites you were only using temporarily anyway. Develop a system that works for you - and stick with it.

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Written by Danial Munsif

I am a Creative Blogger who is addictive to writing on latest topics on Technology, Smartphones, Graphics, Web development and Android