Every publisher is unique
…so our plans are too

How do I get started?

Starting is easy Sign up for free right now, and draft as many stories as you like. You don't pay anything until you're ready to publish your first story.

How are stories published?

That’s up to you.

Here at Shorthand we believe in an open and diverse web. Our aim is to help you create unique, compelling reading experiences for your audience on your website. With that in mind, we offer several publishing options.

First, you can download a zip file containing the HTML, CSS, Javascript and media assets, which you can host on your own servers, at a URL of your choosing. This approach affords you complete flexibility.

Second, you can export the story via our story API, enabling you to automate the story export workflow. This approach is often chosen by customers who have integrated Shorthand with their existing CMS.

Third, if you'd rather, we can host your story on our servers, under a domain or subdomain of your choosing.

Finally, we offer an embed code enabling you to launch the story from a page in your CMS or elsewhere.

How easy is it to use?

Super easy!

But don’t just take our word for it — create a free account and try it for yourself. Our intuitive story editor makes it a breeze to build your story by adding different section types — like Scrollmation and Text Over Media — and then adding text, images and video. You can even create interactive effects without any coding whatsoever. Shorthand helps you tell stories the way you want.

Do I need to know how to code?

Nope.

Shorthand makes it easy to create engaging, media-rich, interactive stories, that look beautiful across any device, without the need for any coding.

Having said that, if you are partial to a bit of CSS, perhaps enjoy some HTML coding or the odd bit of Javascript, we do have developer tools available which you can use to take things even further.

And because the story files are made up of well-formatted HTML, there is also the option of post-export development.