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.
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.
It's easy to start using this feature:
Now, with any Doc or Slide open that you'd like to convert into a microsite:
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.
What your doc looks like in Google Docs.
What your doc looks like as a microsite on simplebooklet.
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:
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.
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.
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:
We've also improved the presentation control you have over the embed version of your booklet. You can:
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
We've also added a few more improvements during all of this work.
Just a quick update that rolled friday before a more significant one coming in the next two weeks.
As part of our commitment to GDPR, we've made your email notification options more obvious on your dashboard. You can now turn on and off the various emails we send you about your booklets from the right hand column of your dashboard. Just select a toggle to turn it on (bright orange) or off (grey).
You can change these settings at anytime. Also, all your GDPR information is available and manageable by you in the YOUR ACCOUNT menu.
Deleting booklets from your dashboard is much faster now. Select the delete button beside your booklet then hit enter. The booklet will be removed. You don't have to wait for the dashboard to refresh, it's automatically updated.
The element container is the box that holds your actual content. Every image, button, text block, video, and code is stored in an element container. We've made it easier to style and manage the container (not the interior contents) by simplifying the left hand toolbar and displaying a new style toolbar.
These two toolbars open the moment you single click on any content element (you can tell it is selected when the 4 yellow dots appear in each of the corners). Double clicking allows you to edit the actual content.
The element toolbar allows you to turn the container into a hyperlink to weblinks, phone numbers, emails, and even to other pages. You can also move an element container above or below other elements on your page. You can use the copy and paste tool to duplicate your element and contents onto other pages. You can also set your container to repeat on all your pages.
The style tool that appears on the right allows you to style the container. You can style the border and the background of the element. This can be terrific for putting text elements into cards, a frame for your photos and videos, and even style your call to action buttons.
We hope you enjoy these new updates.
Thanks, Scott
We've been busy working on an entirely new way to add and edit text on your simplebooklet page. Our goal was to make text editing more intuitive and robust. To do this we've implemented on page editing (you don't create your text in a separate popup anymore), improved the toolbar, and created templates to help you add text faster and with the layouts you want.
This still takes place in the CONTENT page under the TEXT menu. However, when you select this option, you will now choose between a number of preformatted text boxes. These text boxes all contain prebuilt layouts to make adding custom text to your pages faster.
There are four categories of text boxes, found by clicking on the corresponding tab along the top of the text menu:
You can add a blank text box onto your page. This allows you to add any content you want on your page and use the text editing tools to style it as you want.
You can also add a pre-formatted text box to your page. This has replaceable text copy in the text box. You simply highlight the text and type in the content you want.
There are a number of headers you can choose from to add to your page.
There are some premade lists you can add to your page. These lists have a number of different formats for the bullets.
These are paragraph text boxes that automatically distribute your text across two or three columns.
Click and hold then drag any text box onto your page. It will be placed in the location you drop it on your page. This is much more intuitive as it places your text content where you expect it on your page.
Once you've added your text box to the page. You can then double click to start editing the text content.
There are two ways to start working with your text and text box once it is on your page.
This will activate your text box so you can move it and resize it on your page. You can also use the layering, rotation, and linking tools in the content toolbar on the left. You cannot edit the text with a single tap.
This will activate the text editor. The page will focus on the text and you can update, edit, and use the text editor toolbar to style your text. Tapping anywhere outside the text box will save your edits.
When you want to edit any text on your page, all you need to do is double tap anywhere in the text box. This will isolate the text on the page and insert the cursor into the text.
You can type in new text or highlight and replace existing text.
When you highlight any part of the text, it will open up the text toolbar. This will give you access to a number of style and formatting tools you can use with your text.
Once you are done, click anywhere outside your text box, the save button, or the save disk in the text toolbar. This will save your text to your page.
You can resize the text box on your page to fit your layout.
Grab a corner of your text box from one of the little yellow dots, then drag it in any direction to fit your page. The content will respond to the new size and fit within the confines of your text box.
We've added new font themes to simplebooklet. These themes will change the font family and sizes of all the text in your booklet. It sets a theme for your booklet.
Select a theme from the themes menu. It will automatically apply to your entire booklet.
Themes are not applied to text that you have customized using the text toolbar. For example, if you selected a font family and a text size using the text tool, it will use that formatting and ignore the theme formatting.
We've just updated the delete pages tool. You can now delete one or many pages all at once.
To use the new delete pages tool, go to the CONTENT tab for your booklet.
Poof, your pages are gone.
You can also use the keyboard shortcut to tap shift, then select a range of pages you want to delete all at once.
We've also started a new blog to help people get more from their account. We'll be filling it with tips and tricks so you can use some less known marketing and design ideas to boost the promotion of your booklets. These are all suggested strategies that we've seen great results from in other booklets promoted by our users.
https://simplebooklet.com/blog/index.html
As always, we're constantly working to improve the UI, so we've tweaked a number of buttons and layout issues to make the app easier to use.
Please, don't hesitate to contact us with feature improvements you think we can make.
Thanks, Scott
Surely simplebooklet will start publishing changelogs very soon.
Check out our other public changelogs: Buffer, Mention, Respond by Buffer, JSFiddle, Olark, Droplr, Piwik Pro, Prott, Ustream, ViralSweep, StartupThreads, Userlike, Unixstickers, Survicate, Envoy, Gmelius, CodeTree
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