Jo McGivern

Jo McGivern is the founder of The Handpicked Collection, an award-winning online gift shop and catalogue providing a unique selection of well-priced, stylish and high quality gifts. It has an expert panel of entrepreneurs, trendsetters and journalists who review all the products, offering customers a new level of confidence in what they are buying when shopping online or through the catalogue.

Before setting up The Handpicked Collection, Jo was a Director of one of the UK's leading luxury travel PR agencies. She left PR to set up The Handpicked Collection in 2007 when, after having children, she got tired of never having enough time to go shopping and find what she wanted, liked or needed.

JO'S FAVOURITE SITES

Weatherbase - I came across this website when I worked in travel PR. It carries a wealth of historical weather information for all over the world and is pretty specific, most cities are listesd. My husband and I are always on the look-out for good travel deals and I always use Weatherbase to check the reason the offer is so good and that it's not because it's during hurricane season.

Photobox - I take hundreds of photos and for a long time, struggled to stay on top of developing and organising them. Photobox makes it so easy to develop and store them. I live in fear that something will happen to my computer with all my photos on, so love the fact they are all stored on Photobox.

PBS Kids - My children are very computer aware. Even though the oldest two are seven and five, they are already learning to use computers at school and want to use mine at home. This website has fun educational games based around popular TV characters.

This is Your Kingdom - This website describes itself as an 'insider's guide to lovely local things to see and do in the UK,' and is a great source of information on inspiring local businesses. The information comes from 'in the know' local people and is not written by people publicising themselves. Therefore the recommendations are independent and genuine. It is a new site, so is building up the information, but I am lucky in that I live in Hampshire where it has caught on. There are loads of recommendations, restaurants, shops, days out, events. As this website grows, I think it will be a wonderful source of information not only for people's local area, but also to consult before you go on a UK holiday to find hidden gems.

Event Elephant - This is a similar concept to justgiving.com (another of my favourite websites) in that it makes collecting money easy. JustGiving helps individuals raise money for charities, and makes the process of raising and donating so much easier. Gone are the days when you had to physically collect every penny from friends and relatives. Event Elephant does the same for events. So if you are organising any event that requires ticket sales, whether a talk, coffee morning or a black tie ball, instead of personally having to collect cheques or cash from all attending, you can register the event and people wishing to attend, can buy their tickets through Event Elephant.

Feefo - This is a brilliant independent online review site where you can really see how online shops look after their customers. The retailers can't edit the reviews in any way and it gives a real transparency to online shopping. There's nowhere for a company to hide!

22 November 2011