How to Create a Home Page Shortcut for MCB

Because My Custom Bakes is a website that’s accessed via any web browser, many of you have asked if we’re making a standalone app: we decided against this for a few reasons:

1. We’re a one-person development team, which means we have to be super smart about how we use our time and resources. A web app requires less maintenance than an app installed on your device.
2. You can access MCB from any device, using any internet browser.

A bit of a side note, but important: many apps that are installed on your device mine your data in the background. This is a huge advantage of having an app, because it’s profitable: this is one way that apps make money, by selling your usage data to advertisers. Because these background processes require computing power, too many apps can also adversely affect your phone’s performance and battery life.

Ultimately, since money isn’t our primary motivator for creating this tool, we’re not interested in your data, it’s not our business.

HOWEVER, we do recognize the ease of simply clicking a button to access your MCB account. The home screen on your mobile device isn’t just a place where your apps live… you can also add shortcuts to websites. In this post, I’m going to show you how to do that for My Custom Bakes on your mobile device. This depends on what type of mobile device you have, so please read section headings carefully.

If you’re an iOS user on SAFARI as your internet browser:

1. Open mycustombakes.com on your browser, sign in and navigate to your dashboard page
2. Tap the little “share” or more options button, you might have to scroll a little bit but you’ll see the “Add to Home Screen” option, tap it.
3. Put your desired title there, the URL should automatically populate, tap “add” and it should create an icon on your home screen that you can easily tap to access your MCB dashboard

If you’re an iOS user with CHROME or any other internet browser:

1. Search for the “shortcuts” app on your device, open it and tap the “+” sign at the top
2. Tap “+ Add Action” and search for Chrome or any other browser of your choice at the top bar
3. From the list of shortcuts, select “Open URLS in Chrome”
4. Here, tap “URL” and type or paste in the URL of your MCB dashboard
5. Tap the three dotted icons to name the shortcut and add your icon (Tip: take a screenshot of our logo or yours to set as your thumbnail for your MCB shortcut)
6. Select “Add to Home Screen” and tap “Add” again to confirm the action

If you’re on an Android device, you can:

1. Launch the Chrome app
2. Navigate to whatever page you want to make a homescreen shortcut for – so probably your dashboard
3. Tap the menu icon (3 dots in the upper right hand corner), and tap Add to homescreen
4. Enter the name for the shortcut, confirm and Chrome will add it to your homescreen

If you’re having trouble or need some visual walkthroughs, you can google “how to add browser shortcuts to my homescreen for *YOUR DEVICE* for additional resources all over the internet and Youtube.