Pagemodo vs. Shorthand

If you don't have a lot of time or expertise in custom tab creation, Pagemodo offers a quick and easy solution. Custom templates are great to manipulate to meet your individual needs.

Shorthand is ideally suited to visual stories where you have a good number of images and/or embeds or video to include. It is well-suited to long-form stories, where you wish to keep the readers' attention longer than usual. It can help to differentiate particularly important or intriguing stories from others on your website - and for this reason, it could be used as a premium content tool, perhaps for subscribers. It can also be used to showcase stories about awards you've organised, giving them special treatment. It is less suited to breaking news, or very time-sensitive news stories, as it can take some time to prepare, post or update shorthand stories. And it doesn't work well for stories with strong accompanying imagery

Incentivized

• Opportunity to test the tool with a free trial that includes all of their core services
• Fast plug and play templates if design isn't a high priority for you
• Small business/startup pricing is available

• Enabling visual storytelling with multiple pictures
• Embedding rich media within a story, including video
• Engaging readers for longer than average dwell times
• Making it easy to create striking article design without coding experience

Incentivized

• The types of user engagement activities you can perform with Pagemodo are very limited. It seems to be specifically designed for either contests/giveaways/special promotions/discount codes you'd like to share with your customers. So if I wanted to host a poll for my Facebook fans, I wouldn't be able to do so through Pagemodo.
• Pagemodo doesn't accommodate the various types of social media channels. It's specifically designed for Facebook and can really only be used through that. If your goal isn't to attract new Facebook followers or engage the followers you already have, then Pagemodo isn't for you.
• Although it's nice that Pagemodo already has pre-made templates, it somewhat limits your ability to customize your forms or tabs.

• Additional flexibility in how text is overlaid on pictures would be welcome so that there are more choices on what images to use with particular layouts
• Enabling users to control the path of text - for example, enabling runaround - could enable some excellent designs
• Adding additional section templates could speed up design
• More flexibility in caption placement would be helpful

Incentivized

It's free for a limited version, but the amount of email they send can be overwhelming.

Incentivized

I have never known it to be down during my use of it. All you require is an internet connection to log in and you can use it on multiple devices. Adding ease of accessibility, there are simple ways to log in. I've also never known a Shorthand story to go down once live on our site.

Incentivized

Due to the integration with our content management software, there is a short delay on our site while it loads, which may cause some readers to drift away. However, I've seen other sites where it instantly loads articles, so I believe this to be down to the content management software behind our site more than Shorthand itself. Once that brief initial period is over, it doesn't require additional loading time.

Incentivized

As a web-based service, it is easy for users to log into from anywhere. Content can easily be shared, as you can set up teams that enable access to each other's work as required. And content can be reviewed by others before publication using the sharing function. You can also view how an article will look on different devices.

Incentivized

• We saw an increased amount of visitors to our LinkedIn Page which we could attribute to the connectivity Pagemodo offered on a Facebook Custom Tab.

• Helped us create one of our top 10 most-read and most-shared stories in the last year
• Enabled us to elevate key pieces of content, boosting dwell time on our site
• But can also be time-consuming to adopt for some stories, meaning you need to choose well what stories really deserve the investment in time
• Boosted collaboration between teams via its ability to share, including offering the chance for others to preview content prior to publication

Incentivized