How To Publish Your Adobe InDesign Publish Online Documents

So let's go through the publishing a little bit more in depth. Let's go to 'Publish Online'. Couple of things you can do is, I've made some changes. What I want to do is, instead of publishing a new document every time I can go to 'Update Existing Document', and I'd like to update that first one that I made. The reason this is good is that I can make changes to a catalog, let's say I find a typo, or I want to change an image out, I can do that, and I don't have to change the link I've given everybody. Other options we can play around with, we can allow people to download a PDF version if they want. So I'm going to have all the interactivity, but it can be handy for people. You can turn this off, so people can't share or take their own kind of copy of your document, you can keep it a bit more super secret. It makes it harder for people to grab. Let's have a look at some of the advanced features.

We can decide on which pages we want. We can decide on what Thumbnail. You can see, it just picked the cover from my Thumbnail. I can choose an image, and replace that and make one design specifically for being a Thumbnail. And when this thing exports down here, we can decide on what quality it is. '96' looks great. You can make it HiDPI, which is 144. The file size gets bigger, and it takes a lot longer to download. It's up to you, whether you want a-- basically, you're looking after things like Retina displays, like my MacBook Pro here, but, really uncommon, and I think, taking a long time to download is more important than looking is, best as it can, on a really limited number, on laptops. So, it's a good standard.

That's it for this window, you click 'Publish' and it's going to update, that's great. What I want to show you now is some of the analytics that are in the background. So back into InDesign, if we go to 'File' and then go to one that says 'Publish Online Dashboard'. It opens up this website here. This one is for my Publish Online Dashboard. These are all my other publications. And what I really like about them is this Analytics tab. This Analytics tab tells me things like how many times the document's being viewed. How many readers? So you can have a reader who maybe watch it 40 times and that accounts for the views, but this is specific people, the Average Read Time. Total Read Time.

So, what's really handy about this, check that you're looking at hours and minutes, can you see? Sometimes you get a bit confused by the numbers, I do at least, along the top there. What I find that it's really useful for, especially if you're thinking-- we're going to give this a go, this Publish Online. I wonder if it's going to work for our readership-- is to do a test, and then you can come back to it once you've done it, and say, nobody read it or loads of people are reading it for a long time. So gives you some sort of data and metrics. And you can also compare month to month. The people who read the January one are not longer than the February newsletter that we did. So it gives you trackable analytics.

Now the thing is, when you kind of, maybe send out an email with a link, just give it a second, it takes about 90 minutes to actually refresh. So if you've sent that out, and you're like, "Nobody's reading it," give it an hour and half or so to just refresh all of this. So it takes a little while for this data to get collected. You can click on, over here, we're on Overview page, you can click on 'Document Trends', and you can actually see these are the ones I've just been practicing with, you can see, it's only had two views. That can be a bit disappointing. I'm not sure who these two readers are, because it's just me watching it, but it's really useful to kind of see this sort of stuff that-- it's one of the things that I find really hard with the traditional printers. You send things out, and, did they work, did they not work? Really hard to track reliably, but with something like Publish Online, super easy. So that's more advanced publishing. Let's go through and look at all the features you can do with Publish Online.