Even if you're not familiar with Pinterest, chances are your audience is. It's a social networking service that has become enormously popular (literally, by the hundreds of millions). It lets people organize and share the images they find on the web into "boards".

Adding a “Pin it” button to your pages

This website displays a vertical side badge on the left that makes it convenient for people to bookmark content they like. It now features a “Pin it” button that allows them to select and post any image of the page into their own Pinterest boards. Then, when their followers click on the image, they’re taken to this website.

You could easily to the same for your business website, even if you don’t have a Pinterest account yourself (as mentioned before, your visitors are likely to have one).

If your website uses the YWD system like this blog does, all you need to do is choose Pinterest as one of the social bookmarking buttons you want for your website. You do so from YWD Designer without any need of programming.

If you have a blog in YWD, the “Pin it” button will appear at the bottom of the posts when the blog is being displayed in list mode i.e. with multiple posts. Go to the Home page of this blog and notice that at the bottom of all posts you’ll see the button alongside the ones for Facebook, Twitter, etc. (the networks we picked for the blog's website).

Pinning a specific image

The examples above work on a page even with multiple images; people are presented with a nifty interface where they can select the image they want to pin. But there are cases where you may prefer visitors to pin a specific image.

For instance, this client’s blog displays multiple posts in summary mode. When creating the posts, YWD offers the author the option of choosing a specific image for Pinterest. The blog will then display a separate “Pin it” button immediately below it, so when people click on it the information -- the title, description and the image itself -- will be pre-selected. Notice that unlike in the case of a “Pin it” button for the whole page, here Pinterest will include a counter, because it can reference to a particular image within the page.

www.1968magazine.com

Another handy use of Pinterest buttons can be found on real estate websites. YWD has lots real estate clients and this one includes an image gallery for each property. YWD will automatically insert a “Pin it” button right beneath the image for that gallery display style (known as “Carousel”).

www.rina.ca

How about mobile websites?

People use Pinterest on mobile devices too. A “Pin it” button will appear on the mobile-optimized version of a YWD website as well. All you need to do is check Pinterest in YWD Designer / Social media & widgets / social bookmarking. Here's a screenshot:

By the way, YWD's own Pinterest page is http://pinterest.com/therealywd

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