As you'll have seen, Netvibes starts you off by pre-populating your portal with things it thinks you might find interesting. It may have chosen badly, but it’ll help give you a feel for the way Netvibes works.

Move your mouse over one of the little boxes, and you'll see a mini-toolbar appear at the top right corner of the box. This allows you to customise the way that packet of information (or 'module') looks and works, as well as where it’s placed on the portal ‘desktop’.

You'll notice that when you move your mouse over the title area of a module (avoiding the toolbar buttons), the cursor changes to a 'compass' or a 'grabbing hand'; if you click and hold your mouse, you can drag this module around the page - left, right, up... you get the idea.

The small triangle, in the left corner of the title area, gives you the ability to roll the module up and down like a blind, hiding or showing the information under the heading as you choose.

The arrows (see the image below) on the module toolbar will refresh the contents of the module - Netvibes will check for updates regularly, but if you're not used to hanging around you can send it off to check.

The other small triangle - the one in the small square next to the refresh button - gives you options on ways to share your module (we'll look more closely at some of these later), to change the colour of the box, and another way to reposition it on your page.

The ‘Edit’ button, meanwhile, allows you to retitle your module - perhaps ‘News’ might be a bit snappier than ‘BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition’, for example.

You can also make changes to what information is being displayed. For example, on modules delivering news updates you can paste in a different feed address, change the number of items displayed, and choose if you want to have that module's links open directly on the related site when you click on them. On weather modules you can switch the city you're seeing forecasts for, and swap between imperial and metric temperatures.

You'll also get the chance to choose if you want the module to display just the heading of the link, or a little more information about what's behind the link.

After you're happy with these options, you can click on 'close' and hide them.

Or - and this might be the most useful button - you can just click on the 'X' to remove the module altogether.

After you've tweaked and tarted up the start modules, and zapped those you don't want, it's time to add some new content to your page.

Notice, though, that you don't have to cram everything on one page. You can create 'tabs' which work in a similar way to tabbed browsing in Firefox or newer versions of Internet Explorer; by clicking on 'New Tab' you can create a second page.

This is a handy way of grouping together all your content which relates to, for example, your job on one tab, with another tab for your hobbies, and a third on which you can collect everything to do with a course you might be taking.

Once you create a new tab, you can give it a more meaningful name than ‘New Tab’ and customise the look and feel: using the drop-down arrow.

Next: adding feeds