We've released a number of new updates to simplebooklet for March. We hope you enjoy them.

Unsplash Images

You can now add royalty free images to your simplebooklet pages. From the EDIT tab, tap the IMAGES tool and search for photos that would compliment your content. You can use these images in any of your microsite booklet pages.

These are beautiful photos provided by some very talented photographers and are free for you to use how you like in your simplebooklet.

Etsy and Shopify Products

Do you have an Etsy or Shopify store where you sell products? If so, you can now add those products to a booklet page. This allows a customer looking at your simplebooklet to purchase the product right from your page. It's a great way to:

• Show off a product or two.
• Create a more dynamic emotional response in your customer about your product.
• Reaches visitors in multiple digital channels (social, email, website).

Read all about this new feature in our latest case study.

Check out this booklet as well to see a shopify product brochure in action. Tap here

Analytics

We've updated the analytics page for your simplebooklet. With an easier to understand set of graphs and layout, you'll quickly get insight into the reach and engagement of your simplebooklets. Even better, we're now tracking all click activity on your microsite, so you can better understand how customers are engaging with your content.

Notifications

We've updated the email notifications you receive from simplebooklet. You can now receive emails whenever someone shares your booklet on a social network, in email, or grabs your embed code. You'll also get notified whenever a customer completes a form or your lead gate.

New Subscription Plans

We've released new subscription models for specific customer types. We have received a lot of requests from Tourism Bureaus, Client Agencies, Franchise Businesses, and Dealership Networks to provide a white label version of simplebooklet. This allows the business to offer sub accounts in their existing simplebooklet account, offer a branded login page, and more. As the Primary account administrator, you can see what is produced and promoted by your linked accounts, while also deploying simplebooklets to some or all of these sub accounts. It's a great way to manage simplebooklet microsites across multiple clients or teams.

UI Clean Up

Yep, a few little more updates to the user interface to hopefully make it easier to use and know what to do next.

We've got some great stuff getting prepped for rollout in the month of March.

Thanks, Scott

Search

Help out your customers with our new search tool. This new search feature appears in your simplebooklet nav bar and allows your customer to keyword search your pages.

Visibility

You've got 4 new settings for the visibility of your simplebooklet microsite:

• Public Anyone can see your simplebooklet microsite.
• Link Only Your microsite is hidden from search engines.
• Password Only those with a password can view your microsite.
• Paused Only you can see your microsite.

Set the visibility for any of your microsites right from your simplebooklet dashboard.

Design Wizard

We want to make sure your simplebooklet looks the best, so we've introduced a design wizard to help walk you through the most critical features you need in a microsite. You can activate it from the Design tab or whenever you convert a file.

Valentine Backgrounds

Not only have we updated our microsite background tool to be much easier to use and select a background, we've also updated it with new Valentine's backgrounds. Great for your holiday themed simplebooklets.

Google Slides, Powerpoint, and Keynote

Learn about the value of putting your presentation slides up on their own microsite to effectively influence your customers. Read about it here

We rolled a few more transitions this week. These can really enhance the reading experience of your content on your simplebooklet microsite. They are Card Flip, Vertical Card Flip, and Focus.

Card Flip Example

Focus Example

Try them out and see if they work for your content. You'll find them in the DESIGN tab under the TRANSITIONS menu. Select the single page presentation and then choose the transition.

We just rolled out a few new transitions. The big one is the tri fold transition. This will take your tri-fold brochure in PDF format and turn it into a proper tri fold flip just like you do when you hold one in your hand.

Take a read through our posting on the value of putting your offline tri fold brochures online.

Read Article

We've just released a big update to integrate your Google Docs, Slides, and Drive account with your simplebooklet account. You can now turn any slide or doc you have in your Google account into a simplebooklet microsite right from Google Docs and Google Slides. You can even edit the file in your new microsite.

This gives you a lot more authoring options for your content. Use the templates in Google Docs and Slides to start your new brochure, flyer or newsletter, then import it to simplebooklet and voila, you have a microsite you can share, post, pin, email and promote all from a unique, branded web address.

Get it for Google Docs

Get it for Google Slides

It's easy to start using this feature:

1. Sign into your Google Docs or Slides account.
2. Tap the ADD-ON menu option.
3. Search for the Simplebooklet add-on and install it.

Now, with any Doc or Slide open that you'd like to convert into a microsite:

1. Tap the ADD-ON menu.
2. Select the Simplebooklet add-on.
3. Select the "convert to microsite" option.

You'll be launched into your simplebooklet account and we'll automatically start converting and optimizing your slide or doc to be an impressive microsite.

Here are a couple of examples of a Doc and Slide file being converted to a microsite.

Product Brochure Google Doc

What your doc looks like in Google Docs.

What your doc looks like as a microsite on simplebooklet.

Presentation Google Slides

What your slide looks like in Google Slides.

What your Slides look like as a microsite.

It's the easiest way to get a website going for your product, service, or event when using Google Docs and Slides.

We just relaunched our google drive integration. You can get it here in the g suite marketplace:

https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/simplebooklet/406592889490

The GDrive integration will allow you to select any PDF, Slide, Doc, or Sheets in your Drive and convert it instantly into a simplebooklet microsite.

You simply right click on the file, select Open with > Simplebooklet

Your file will automatically be uploaded to your simplebooklet account and begin walking you through the conversion process. Stay tuned as we get ready to launch our Docs and Slides Add Ons to make this process even easier.

Why not give your simplebooklet microsite a festive and timely presentation with a holiday background. Your microsite background will go a long way to communicating that your content is relevant to the current holiday season, and fill your customer with a sense of urgency around your message.

We've provided a few Christmas, new year, and winter holiday backgrounds for you to use for free.

Try one out by following these steps:

1. Open your simplebooklet in the DESIGN tab.
2. Tap the BACKGROUNDS menu.
3. Select the GIFT icon for the background tabs.
4. Tap on the background you would like to use.
5. Tap SAVE.

We'll apply the background to your microsite.

Don't forget to style the header and footer to integrate it with your current LAYOUT and selected background.

Thanks, Scott

It's really big. We're giving you some amazing new tools to customize the presentation of your simplebooklet, improving workflow so its faster and simpler to make a simplebooklet, and improving a number of promotion tools. First, the big one.

Microsite Presentation

So, what is a microsite layout for your simplebooklet?

First impressions matter. Think of the microsite as the stage your booklet is displayed on. It's what makes the first impression before customers even start to read your content.

But sometimes its easier to see it to understand it. Here are three examples of the exact same booklet using five different microsite layouts.

• Modern Presentation
• Minimalist Presentation
• Icon Only Presentation
• Embedded Presentation
• Mobile Presentation

You can now customize the whole presentation of your booklet at its URL. This is all done from the new DESIGN tab.

You can do the following:

1. Add custom backgrounds or choose one of our hand picked backgrounds.
2. Choose where the nav buttons that support your booklet are located (along the top or bottom, icon buttons or text).
3. Choose which buttons appear with a simple toggle on or off switch.
4. Customize each button's content that appears in the popout modal when tapped.
5. Customize the page turn button that flips pages in your booklet (choose size, position, arrow type, color, and shape).
6. Choose the page animation when a user transitions from one page to the next.
7. Choose the size the page default opens when a customer opens your URL.
8. Add or remove a page shadow (helps to integrate a booklet page into the website background).

We've also improved the presentation control you have over the embed version of your booklet. You can:

1. Turn on or off the supporting nav buttons.
2. Choose to display those buttons either on the top, bottom, or in both top and bottom navbars.
3. Add page turn buttons that float on the sides of the booklet in embed.

Configurable Embed Code

You can now configure how your navigation buttons and layout work with the embedded version of your simplebooklet. You'll be able to choose where your nav bar appears, which buttons appear on it, and if your booklet has page turn buttons. All of this in a more updated, modern toolset and look.

Improved PDF Conversion

We've improved the conversion process for your PDFs to use our advanced link enabler in existing PDFs (this is a beta feature and doesn't work for all PDFs).

Improved Authoring

We've reduced the number of steps involved in authoring your booklet. Anything that involves content inside your pages is edited from the EDIT tab. Anything to do with how your booklet is presented is configured from the DESIGN tab.

Get a glimpse of what it looks like in the PREVIEW tab, then start distributing your booklet through all the channels available in the PROMOTE tab.

Improved User Interface

We've cleaned up and improved a number of the tools and the buttons that activate these tools. Hopefully they are more intuitive and consistent across the app as you use the various customization features.

New, Simpler Pricing

We've improved the subscription plans we have for simplebooklet. You can now choose between two plans. With either plan, you can purchase additional booklets to add to your account. Only purchase as many more booklets as you need. Each plan contains features specifically requested by users, so you don't have to pay for features you don't use, and you can get the features you really want at a well priced value.

We're excited to see what our users create and promote with their simplebooklet account.

Thanks, Scott

We've made some updates to the simplebooklet platform for our PRO plans.

Pro subscribers can now download in an excel spreadsheet the data collected through a lead gate in their booklet. The email, phone and name of the person who completed the lead gate will be listed under the booklet it was captured on. The spreadsheet will also contain all the booklets and their corresponding data. As an xlsx file, you can import it into any crm or sales funnel program you use or just leave it in the spreadsheet format.

We've also implemented wildcard custom domains. This means when you set up a custom domain on simplebooklet for your booklet and galleries, we'll automatically update them to https:// secure links. This is very important as Google has made it mandatory that sites are secure or will be marked as unsecure and also ranked lower in their database. You will not need to purchase an SSL cert for your custom domain as we will automatically do this for your account at no cost (SSL certs can run to 200$ a year at some hosting providers).

Going PRO with simplebooklet just became even better.

Thanks, Scott

Okay, we've been busy. We're rolling a new update that adds new features and improves existing ones.

Images

We have completely rebuilt the way images are handled in your booklet pages. Now you can upload an image from your computer or from a link on the web. This is handy for pulling in images from various cloud drives or web sources you have access.

You also add and manage your images differently than you did in the past. Now, you select an image block from the image menu and drag it onto your page. You can select from:

1. Small - this is an image that is optimized for 240 pixels wide.
2. Medium - this is an image that is optimized for 600 pixels wide.
3. Large - this is an image that is optimized for 800 pixels wide.
4. Fit To Page - this will scale the image to fit within your page.

Select an image block that is closest to the size of the image you want on your page. This will allow us to better optimize your image for clarity and size so your booklet loads faster and still looks great. You can still resize the image on the page once it's there, but this will help optimize that image closer to your intended use.

Images will not scale beyond their natural size (except in the fit to page image block) so the quality of your image doesn't degrade.

Double tap on the image placeholder to replace the image placeholder and upload your own image.

Editing Images

When you drag an image block over to your page, it is represented with an image placeholder. By double clicking on the image placeholder, you will reveal the image toolbar.

Tap the replace button. This will open the upload menu to select and upload a new image.

You can upload an image from your device or from a weblink to an image somewhere on the internet. You can also open tap the folder icon to access images you've already uploaded previously to your simplebooklet account. This is great for images you use often, like logos.

The new image will resize the image to fit within the constraints of the image box.

You can also add alternative text to the image to ensure that your images are also available to screen readers.

Image Templates

We've also included image templates (and will add more soon). These are pre-formatted layouts of images and text combined to help speed the creation of pages in your booklets. These include an image and a text block, both of which you can edit.

Clipart

The new image functionality has allowed us to add clipart to our Content tools. These are SVG images that can be scaled to any size without losing their quality. You can drag and drop any clipart item onto your page, then resize and rotate it to fit your page. You can even overlay text boxes to provide additional information in the clipart (like badges).

Clipart is also very useful for creating your own buttons. By using the element toolbar link function and the style toolbar, you can make engaging buttons that trigger an action you want to happen when the reader taps on your new button.

The old shapes tool has also moved into the clipart menu. You drag a shape onto your page, then resize it and layer it on your page, then use the style tools to change it's background color and other style features.

Settings

We've added a few more controls in the booklet settings menu. These tools allow you to universally apply certain settings to all your existing and future booklets (they set booklet defaults so you don't have to every time you create a booklet).

New features include:

1. Ability to set the visibility of your booklets to search engines (basic subscription required).
2. Ability to set your logo for all new booklets (pro subscription required).

When you use a booklet setting, you can still override them on a per booklet basis. Just open the booklet and modify that particular setting.

Odds and Ends

We've also added a few more improvements during all of this work.

1. Two new text blocks to add to your page.
2. Improved naming to the menus in the Content Tab.
3. Moved shapes into the clipart menu.
4. Changed the Advanced tool name to Code.
5. Changed the toolbar buttons to squares and moved the element buttons to the top left corner of the content element.
6. Bug fixes, so many bug fixes.