How to Improve Discoverability

You have seen how Pinned sites can provide a more interactive experience for your users; however, your users might not know that your site can be pinned.In this section, you learn some ways to advertise the features of your Pinned site.

Description

It is important to realize that Windows Internet Explorer does not notify a user if the site can be pinned. It is up to the developer to advertise these features.

The following are just a few of the variety of ways you can alert your users to the Pinned site features of your website.

  • Fly-ins, drop-downs, banners, and div effects. These regions detect the Pinned site capabilities of the browser and ask the user to pin the site.
  • Drag-to-pin icons and images. Users can pin the site by dragging any image that you provide to the taskbar.
  • First run experience. You can easily detect when the user pins the site for the first time. This is a great opportunity to call attention to the specific features of your Pinned site.

Tasks

Topic Description

Prompting Users to Pin your Site

This task explains how to use the Pinned site API to add a website shortcut to the Windows Start menu and launch a Pinned site browser window. It also describes how you might promote site pinning functionality and encourage users to pin sites to the Windows 7 taskbar.

Informing Users of the Benefits of Pinning your Site

This topic discusses a method that you can use to inform your users about the benefits of pinning your website.

Dragging an Image to Pin the Site

This topic explains how to implement a custom image that you can drag to the taskbar to pin a site.

Creating a First-run Experience

This topic describes how you can detect when a Pinned site is launched by the user for the first time.

 

Pinned Sites Developer Documentation