If you’re new to Netvibes and don’t really know where to start, here’s a quick guide to teach you all the basics about our Dashboards and how to use them to gather all the content that’s relevant to you. Monitor everything about a topic on the web, inside and outside an organization: content, report, conversations, trends… all in one place, always up-to-date.
What is a Dashboard?
Dashboard is the name of a standard page in Netvibes. It’s a dynamic workspace where you can add modules called Apps (or Widgets), which are small applications that’ll provide specific information or functionality.
A default Dashboard looks like this:
Create a New Dashboard & Signup
Before anything else, you need to sign up. Go to this page, choose one of the popular dashboards or enter a specific keyword, Netvibes will do the rest and populate your page with a few relevant sources to get started.
Once your first dashboard is generated and displayed, click on Sign Up at the the top right of the screen to create a new account. You can either choose to use your email address to register, or your Facebook account (via Facebook connect).
You can also give a title to your dashboard by clicking on the “Enter the title of your page here” and replacing it with the title you want.
Add New Content
Netvibes allows you to add content from all your favorite web sites via RSS. If you don’t know what RSS is, check out this page. You can also add Apps (or Widgets) with various purposes (like Weather, Twitter & Facebook feeds, etc.).
To do so, click on the Add button in the the upper-left corner of your screen, then choose one of the following:
Essentials: contains a selection of essential widgets, to manage emails, monitor social networks, write to-do lists, etc.
Categories: offers a selection of news feeds sorted in categories (News, Business, Sport, Games, etc.)
Feed: if you can’t find what you need in the two previous sections, you can also add the URL to any website you like, Netvibes will automatically detect available RSS/Atom feeds. If the site you entered offers multiple types of RSS/Atom feeds, you’ll be presented with a confirmation window asking you to select one.
Filters & MisoData are only available for Netvibes Premium accounts and won’t be covered in this post. If you want to know more about MisoData, watch the demonstration video!
Let’s try to add a feed. Click on Add, then Feed, then enter the URL of our blog “http://blog.netvibes.com”. That’s it! You should now have a new module on your page with a listing of our latest posts. Add as many as you want, move them around the dashboard and reorganize them as you see fit, by simply dragging & dropping any widget.
And if your page looks cluttered, add new tabs and dispatch some of the widgets there. To add a new tab, just click on the “+” at the right of the tab navigator, choose a keyword and hit “Create” (or click “Leave the Tab empty” if you want an new empty tab).
And finally… let’s do some quick customization
Netvibes pages are sorted into 3 columns by default. You can change that by clicking on the little arrow at the right of a tab. A new panel will appear that will allow you to:
Change the color of the tab
Rename it
Share the tab (read more about our new Sharing tool here)
Change the number of columns and how they are displayed
You can also change the dashboard theme by selecting a new one from the options menu on the top right of the screen (the icon that looks like a mixing table). Netvibes offers a lot of customized themes out of the box, but you can also design your own, using our Theme Creator.
And there you go! Your brand new Dashboard is ready! Of course we’ve only scratched the surface, there’s a lot of amazing things you can do with Netvibes Basic and Premium: in-depth brand monitoring, analytics, social monitoring and much more. Got questions or remarks? Want us to cover a specific topic in our next tutorial? Let us know in the comments below or our Uservoice page.
And stay tuned for more tutorials!
Related posts:
Add Instagram & Photostreams To Your Netvibes Dashboard
Dashboard Everything. The answer to the real-time Web.
Dashboard Widgets: Stick Your Favorites on Your Desktop