Issuu.com - embed the full viewer in your site, 2 column style

(Push the right arrow in the flash app above to flip the page!)

I work at a local newspaper and one of the “new technologies” they have been working on is a flip page viewer online for our printed publications. We have anywhere from 25-35 special sections (as we call them) go out yearly along with the newspaper. Somewhat recently the discovery of Issuu.com came about. There were some issues with our issues Ok, that was kinda lame… So we were having problems uploading our PDF’ed special sections which resulted in getting me involved in solving the problem. It was a simple matter of using the correct .joboptions (PDF settings), which we initially didn’t know about.

So, being the curious bugger I am, since I was now involved, I checked out all the cool things Issuu.com could offer. It’s pretty sweet really. You upload your PDF’ed publication, it converts it into a really nice flash page flip publication. Then you can put the link on your website or you embed the mini-viewer (as displayed above).

ichk! Who wants to send people away from your website? That’s not the goal with most websites. So I was off to solve the problem! Of course I checked out their Help section first and there are two example pages that had already embedded the full viewer at their website.

I wanted to take it a step further and incorporate a column on the left of the page. Why? Because we wanted to be able to provide additional information and links for our advertisers, plus our company logo, etc. It was important to be able to open the page while staying at our website, then navigate to other pages or back to the previous page easily.

To view the end result go here.

If you would like to do this on your site you can download the example files here.

As soon as I have more time I will do a full write up about all the cool features of Issuu.com but I thought I’d share this one right away!