Shorthand enables the user to create interactive multimedia stories for any online audience — all with no code. The vendor boasts that Shorthand is used by hundreds of publishers, brands, non-profits, and more — including the BBC, Honda, Business Insider, and Doctors Without Borders.
If you have a lot of clients whom have a strong social media presence, then RebelMouse would be a good option for you. It helps streamline all of your social media posts, so that everyone can be on the same page. Pretty cool stuff. It's even good for your own company (we played with it for a while). I would highly recommend anybody looking to create consistency in their social media campaigns to use RebelMouse
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
RebelMouse is actually open to almost any concept of building your layout. They offer a number of templates as well as the ability to use your own custom layout. Since I'm picky with that kind of stuff, that really appeals to me.
Hosting is super simple. Like, it's as simple as signing up and creating as many sites as you would like with unlimited bandwidth and either a custom URL – which is something I really appreciate.
The platform was built for marketing, It takes all these different approaches of reaching people and makes them easier to use simultaneously all in one feed. Super cool stuff.
Initially setting up automation is confusing, and not easily explained through their site – especially if you want to streamline everything in your feed. In a nutshell they need to walk you through some things when you're starting up, and they just don't do that.
There's a lack of intuitive design that can also be confusing to people just starting out. Took me a while to shift through some tabs before I found my footing in the program – and i'm fairly tech savvy!
The company's website isn't exactly intuitive, and can turn away customers. Some people in my work have even visited the site and walked away from it actually confused as to what the service provides. Poor user interface on that part.
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
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.
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.
There's really not a program like RebelMouse, at least not in my experience. This program has helped us immensely with our social media presence (as I've been praising in this review). I would highly recommend it. If there's a better program out there, I have yet to hear about it
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.
