Over the weekend my husband sent me a link to Leafletter, so I took a break from grant-writing and web site development to experiment with it. One of my experiments was for a client, but, unfortunately, I can't share that with you. The other was for me, a result of me thinking about re-purposing some of my blog content after a Skype conversation a few weeks ago with David Wilcox. (My version is above--click on one of the little boxes and you'll see what happens).

Leafletter bills themselves as the Little Website:

  . . .  a "revolutionary" way for anyone to create a portable, interactive "little web site"        ("Leaflet") using nothing but a web browser.       

You can easily distribute Leaflets to social networks, blogs, and other web sites.             Use Leaflets for everything from portfolios to marketing materials. It's simple and free.

Although a little buggy at times, (give them a break, it's in beta),  it's actually a pretty cool program.

You can create leaflets of up to 10 pages and select one of 36 layouts for each page. You can add color, text, images and links to each box within a page and the links can either link to another page in the Leaflet or to an external link. If you click on the little boxes in mine, you'll see that they link to specific posts from my blog. The Leaflet that I created for my client links to some PDF files.

Once you've created the Leaflet, you can preview it to see how it will look and also to get the URL to the Leaflet or the code to embed it in a web page. I embedded my client's into a wiki page and it worked beautifully.

One complaint I did have with the site was working with text. There's no way to change font sizes, so if a word was too long to fit in a box, then it would break the word in the middle. Kind of annoying when one letter of a word goes down to the next line. Ultimately I ended up creating jpgs of the text I needed and uploading the graphics. But overall, the thing worked pretty well.

For me, I can see a lot of uses for it besides re-packaging content for my blog. I could also see using it as a nice visual for an e-portfolio with one box going to a PDF of a resume, another going to your blog or wiki, another going to a description of a project you worked on. It would also be a great way to do a marketing campaign or send out a mini tutorial or lesson for staff training.

It's pretty easy to learn, so you may want to give it a try.