For the past few months we’ve been working on a new section of the website that makes a few things easier for readers, and introduces some functionality that people have asked for in the past. 

This new ‘Reader’s Area’ allows you to:

• Save articles in order to refer to them later
• Save favourite images to create a personal lookbook or wishlist
• Manage which comment threads you receive alerts on
• Manage PS newsletter subscriptions
• Track past orders on the PS Shop

Other smaller benefits are that you can see your reading history – so even if you don’t save an article, you can go back and find something that had useful information; and it’s easier to add a profile image, so something consistent appears when you leave a comment on an article.

The new area is live now – you can access it by clicking on the image of a person in the top right of the website. 

We’ve been testing this for a while, but I’m sure there will be small issues to iron out, or processes that don’t work as you might expect. If that’s the case, please do let us know in the comments, and the web development team will get onto them. 

Of course, to have a personal area like this, it’s necessary to have more of your details and how this personal data is handled is important. Please see here for our privacy policy, spelling out how the data is handled. 

My feeling is the benefits that will be most popular among readers are the saving of articles, and of images. 

Although our navigation is pretty straightforward, it will always be limited by the chosen taxonomy. I can see saving articles would be useful in order to build references for things like cloth choice for future commissions – bookmarking things from both the Guide to Cloth and specific review articles together, for example. 

And similarly with images, I know readers that already save pictures from around PS to build a timeline for things they are going to invest in – and others that to do so in order to remember ideas for outfits and combinations. 

Most of the functionality is self-explanatory I think, but for these two things it needs to be spelt out that: 

Favourite articles

• To save an article you click ‘Add to favourites’ at the top of an article
• It should then appear in your ‘Favourite articles’ list in the reader area
• To remove it, click ‘remove’ in that area, or the same button at the top of the article

Favourite images

• To save images you click the bookmark symbol that appears when you roll over the image
• On mobile, you can’t roll over so you click on the image to enlarge it, and then click the bookmark symbol
• That should then appear in the ‘Favourite Images’ part of the reader area
• To unsave it, click the bookmark symbol in the reader area, or on the original article

I really hope that this new functionality brings readers and the PS team closer than ever – it’s always been a huge part of what makes the site successful, and creating new functionality can only help. 

If there is any new functionality you would like to see, do bring this up in the comments and we can create a roadmap of future improvements. Just like the article suggestions in the comments of articles, it makes the whole thing a mutually beneficial feedback loop. 

Thanks, and enjoy the new area.

Simon