Create Dynamic Tours and Neighborhood Guides with Jauntful

September 2, 2014

It’s not always easy to come up with new topics to blog about. Writing detailed neighborhood pages and interviewing local business owners can be an effective way to engage your community and create new dynamic content. But it takes a lot of time and effort. Some weeks, you just won’t have that kind of time, but you still need to put something new out there. A new web app called Jauntful is about to make your life easier. Better yet, it’s going to make you look like a rock star to your clients.

Basically, Jauntful lets you build custom tour guides that are both printable and embeddable. Each map can fit up to 15 locations. Printed versions fit on standard paper, with a map and locations plotted up top, and brief descriptions of each location, below. Web-based versions include pictures of each location, as well as contact info, when available. Jauntful pulls its information from Foursquare, which means most of the data is already included. You just type in the name of a park or bar or store, and the location and picture will autofill from Foursquare’s archives. All you need to do is write a brief description for each location. You can also upload custom photos, if you prefer.

Here’s an example tour I made for Seattle: Newbie’s Guide to Seattle
Here’s that same guide embedded into an agent’s website.

This tour is meant to be a general introduction to the city of Seattle, so there’s a mix of individual selections, like parks, sites and restaurants, as well as some whole neighborhoods to explore. The whole thing took about 20 minutes to create. The hardest part was narrowing an entire city worth of sites, food and drinks down to 15 places. The beauty of this is that you can create as many as you want. It’s free. So the possibilities are endless. You can focus on places within particular neighborhoods, or the city’s best pizza places, live music venues or grocery stores. Anything you think is worth sharing with clients, really.

Once you’ve created your guides, you can print them and hand them to clients visiting from out of town. Or you can embed them right into your website, then e-mail pdf versions to your clients. As simple as these guides are to make, they are tremendously valuable tools for people exploring new areas. They’re easy to read, interactive and just plain cool. No one needs to know you only spent a few minutes on them.

Jauntful is still in its infancy, so it will likely change over the coming months. For now, at least, it’s free to sign up, and there are no restrictions on the number of guides you can make.