[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 473 entitled Creating Visual Stories in WordPress using the shorthand plugin. It was published on Thursday, the 25th of June, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we chat with the founder of Shorthand, a few bits of housekeeping if you like, what we do over at WP Builds, head to our subscribe page.
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Okay? What have we got for you today? Well, today I'm chatting with Ricky Robinson, Ricky's from Australia, and for many, many years, he's had what could only be described as a SaaS product, I suppose It's called shorthand, and it enables you to create compelling visual kind of interactive content. Now, this has now been ported over to a WordPress plugin, so you can do all of that inside of your WordPress instal.
Think about when you've scrolled on, let's say. a news website, and you scroll down. And as the story on that news article has developed, things have scrolled in from the side. Charts have kind of come in and then grown over time. Arrows have been pointing down, and as you scroll, they follow down and pictures fade in and all of this kind of flashy stuff.
Well, that's what shorthand does, and we chat with Ricky today about why he's built it and why it's finally got a WordPress plugin, and you can see how it works, what it does, and of course, the pricing. Perhaps this is for you. If it is, I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Ricky Robinson, all the way from Brisbane in Australia.
Hello, Ricky.
[00:03:35] Ricky Robinson: Good day, Nathan. How are you?
[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, I love the authentic Australian. Hello. That's lovely. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm good. And, we got Ricky on the podcast today, and honestly, WordPresses, I don't think you'll have come across something much like this in the past. And yeah, I think you are gonna be curious if you are a jobing WordPress, and you are, especially if you're building client websites.
this is gonna be interesting because it's all about making storytelling or rich media, or, Ricky can explain that in a moment, but turning your WordPress website into a more interactive, front end, shall we say. Let's put it that way. And, so the product that Ricky has got is called shorthand.
It's been around for donkeys years by the looks of things, but in the more recent past, the WordPress integration has been created. So we'll get into that in a moment. But, Ricky, you just said before we hit record, that you've been familiar with WordPress for a little while. Do you, are you able to just tell us a little short backstory about you, little potted bio if you like?
[00:04:41] Ricky Robinson: Sure you wanna get into that. so yeah, I, just checked my blog before coming onto the podcast actually to see, when I migrated over to WordPress and it was, 2005.
[00:04:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's a
[00:04:54] Ricky Robinson: so I, it, yeah. And, so the story there was, 2000, 2001, there weren't very many blogging tools, right? So I actually wrote my own blogging system.
That was my very first, non university assignment piece of software that I wrote for myself. and, yeah, it was pretty cool. I used it, my brother used it, hundreds, maybe thousands of blog posts on that thing. And then 2004, this thing, WordPress started like taking off, right? And I think around that time there was, WordPress, there was movable type, there were a few other platforms.
and WordPress took off because immovable type changed their licencing or something, and people got upset and WordPress started going gangbuster. So I thought, okay, this is my tool's not something I'm gonna maintain forever. I'll, I had an RSS feed so I could just suck up the, suck up all the posts into WordPress.
And, and then never, looked back. I, kept blogging for oh, it must have been 10, 12 years. I've slowed down in the last five, 10 years. But yeah. yeah, lots of, lot, lots, and lots of blog posts written, lots of, lots of characters typed into tiny mc.
[00:06:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, Going back all those years. So at some point though, you've swung into, I dunno if SAS app creation and, more broadly, web publishing and that kind of thing is your background. But what we're gonna be looking at today is something called shorthand. And I'm really impressed that you've got that URL.
Maybe you've just had it for two decades or more, I don't know. But it's shorthand.com. Honestly, the nature of this podcast, we're gonna, we're gonna go through it. Obviously we're talking, it's an audio medium. That's how this podcast is structured. That's just the way it is. But this tool is incredibly visual.
Like really, it's all about the visual. So my recommendation would be if at any point you get a bit puzzled, just hit pause, go to a desktop, I think is probably gonna be your best experience. Type shorthand.com into a browser, have a poke around, watch some of the videos and things like that. And you'll, quickly pick up and then come back and join the podcast.
So it's a banal question. Ricky, sorry about that. Just tell us what shorthand is, what does it do, and why did you build it? Let's begin There.
[00:07:22] Ricky Robinson: Yeah. so shorthand is, first and foremost a visual storytelling platform. So you might've heard the term Scrolly telling. I think, that's, what people, call, a lot of the stories that are created with shorthand and, and similar tools. and it came about because, back in, the 20 13, 20 12 era, the New York Times started doing some like really immersive feature storytelling.
their famous one was called Snowfall. and they spent six months and, a bunch of developers and designers, to put that one page together. Wow. and then, yeah, so it, it took a lot of effort back then, right? and so other news organisations wanted to do the same thing, but they didn't all have the resources that the New York Times have.
and so there was an opportunity there to productize that kind of storytelling. And so rather than having, have, having to do that thing bespoke and from scratch every time it's can we put a tool together? It's really, great for your editors, your journalists, your designers, and, when you need them, your developers as well, to come together, and to create one of these, immersive pieces.
And so that's how we got started. our first customers, the Guardian in the uk. and then, the, BBC, the Telegraph and, yeah, just started in that news media space. and then, news media is great. but it is a, it's a, challenging segment.
and The great thing about, about having those really top news publishers as customers to begin with is people read those stories. Like probably everyone may not have heard of shorthand, but you've absolutely seen shorthand stories, and, may not have known it, right? you'll see those, people would scroll through them and go, oh, wow, like, how did the BBC do this?
and there's a little shorthand credit at the bottom. And we started getting customers from all sorts of brands, nonprofits, co corporations, who either had, brand publishing teams where they had, blogs, but occasionally they needed to do a, more immersive feature story, something that would engage their audience.
or they'd have, annual reports, or if you're a nonprofit, you've got some kind of, campaign where you kinda want to really pull the heartstrings and get that emotion across and then put the donation button at the bottom. and so that's, that's shorthand today. And, we're used, yeah, beyond, news media organisations today.
in, in, in every segment you can think of. the biggest investment banks, the US government departments, et cetera.
[00:10:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's amazing. If you go to shorthand.com, as I encourage you to do earlier, right near the top, and you see this all the time on websites, like this set of logos. And, but then if you look carefully, it never actually says as used by or anything like that. It's just a set of logos and it means nothing.
But you are saying that these companies, the following list, the companies either have or are still using shorthand, let just rattle through a few. 'cause this is, this really gives you a sense of it. So Christie's, the BBC, nature Penguin Publishing, Honda Trip Advisor, save the Children, Dow Jones, Manchester City Football Club, sky Sports, English, heritage, Oxford University, unicef.
[00:11:18] Ricky Robinson: Yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, like the, our customers that we have, we love them all. and they do a really great job of storytelling, right? And so that's why we wake up in the morning is, to really help those teams who, our, platform tends to be a fit for those folks who have a really great brand, and what they're trying to do is, Hey, we've got these really great stories.
We've got like an archive of, really great historical images, or, videos and, they just, they need a platform that enables them to maintain their reputation and to really hit that, that high note that their brand has already achieved. They, just don't have all the, time and the resources to be able to do it as, quickly as they would want to until they get shorthand, right?
And so that's the kind of the space that, that we fill. yeah, and, we're, really super proud and, super lucky to have the, customer base that we do. You can, I know if you got to the inspiration link at the top of the menu and go to the examples, then you'll see a whole bunch of stories from those
[00:12:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah,
[00:12:30] Ricky Robinson: If you
[00:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: I've just done
[00:12:31] Ricky Robinson: click the, Cayo sucker one, that one's not a bad one. From Arsenal.
[00:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, there's a lot on there anyway, but I basically, the reason I'm saying that is this tool is widely used and the new bit here, I suppose is the introduction of a WordPress component to this. 'cause prior to, this year you had to do this elsewhere on assassin.
We'll get into all of that in a moment, but let's, just talk about what storytelling is. So I've seen this, maybe I've seen, maybe I've seen your product actually in use because on the BBC website, when there's a story, which is how to describe it's difficult to explain. just the words won't cut it.
So there, there's data that needs to be put into there. There's maybe some map or something like that needs to change over time. And you'll be scrolling on the mobile phone. And then you'll notice that the more you scroll, you don't actually scroll. What's happening is the map is getting updated and more layers are being put onto the map and, and the statistics and the data is being updated.
And, then once that's finished doing whatever it's doing, you scroll and then there's maybe a bit more text. And then, so anyway, the, what I'm trying to say is it's this real rich interactive layer, which 20 years ago nobody probably thought was even possible. Certainly nobody wanted it, but now we do seem to need it.
and so that's my curious question at the beginning is h how, do you notice that people are expecting this kind of content now? Because especially with the mobile phone, where you've really got access to, I can click here and I can click there and I can push here a tiny bit and scroll back a tiny bit.
What do, you feel that like the future is gonna be, I don't know if dominated the, is the right word, but do you, notice the future in which this kind of content is necessary? Because we've just become used to it on things like the BB, C.
[00:14:29] Ricky Robinson: Yeah. And there's lots of visual sort of social platforms today as well, like your tiktoks and, whatnot. So that, kind of visual format is, definitely, is coming to the fore. and for that younger generation as well. oh yeah. And so I think, one of the things that like, that we wanna be careful about with our customers, is. Shorthands not for everything. This format is not for everything. If you're gonna do it for everything, then nothing is special anymore, right? this format tends to be where you wanna put in that, little extra effort to to make something that does get that higher engagement that does get people scrolling all the way to the bottom.
and so for news orgs, it's usually, your, feature stories where, you are, you're really trying to communicate your, your brand, your authenticity as a really great news organisation, right? And you're doing these investigative pieces or your feature pieces. And so it's for that sort of content.
Most of the time, having said that, you can go to the BBC and they've got some very standard sorts of, stories created with shorthand as well. and I think that's just partly 'cause the editor's so really nice to use and maybe nicer to use them than they're, know.
Then there are proprietary CMSI, I'm not sure. but yeah, it's one of those things where, you don't, wanna flood your audience with this kind of thing and just make these rich, immersive stories, everything, because people get, desensitised to it, right? And, then you, yeah.
so that, and that's, just coming to the, WordPress side of things. we've got, you are, in WordPress and you're creating your kind of everyday content with Gutenberg. but then occasionally, once a week, once a month, you've got something special, right?
And, the shorthand format, as it is today is is for those once a week, once a month type things. Having said that, we do have customers, Chris is one of them that is publishing thousands of these every year. it's, and it makes sense for them 'cause they've got lots of beautiful auction lots to show off.
[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh yeah. Products. What a great idea. Yeah,
[00:17:12] Ricky Robinson: yeah. Yeah. funny story. last year, Christie's website got hacked during one of their big auction weeks, and it was in the New York Times and everything. And, because those auction lots were, hosted on shorthand, they'd created them in shorthand. They actually diverted their whole auction to their shorthands to their shorthand stories.
[00:17:38] Nathan Wrigley: Great.
[00:17:38] Ricky Robinson: which was really
[00:17:39] Nathan Wrigley: period, you were Christie's.
[00:17:41] Ricky Robinson: Yeah, we were, yeah, absolutely. And New York Times was like, oh, they're using this, this free website builder to like, to save the day. And we're like, yeah, we are not, free.
[00:17:54] Nathan Wrigley: I, I, think that's really interesting, like the idea of, maintaining some special, place for these. Like it's a once a week thing or it's, I don't know, you've got a brand new product that you w wish to launch and you wish to show it in all of its dimensions and get the data out there and all that kind of stuff.
Because I don't think most people wanna live in a world where every single thing is interactive, but having that notion of, okay, here's something special. Thi this is one of the curious things that, that I always find when I, for example, go back, going back to the BBC, I never know when that stuff's coming.
It always surprises me that I'm I, maybe I've read 200 words of an article and, I'm expecting to scroll and now I scroll, hang on a minute. Wait, what just happened? Now I'm into some other thing. And so the demarcation of when it becomes special, is something, some kind of a challenge.
you don't really wanna say, hang on, wait, dear, reader, you're about to enter a different interface or anything like that. But I've always found that to be strange. but anyway, regardless of that, so how does this actually work? If I were to, let's say, go in, I was to instal the, new, I'm gonna use that word.
I dunno how long you've been working on this. The, the plugin brand new. Okay, great. That's good to know. I instal the plugin. What does the editor interface look like? how can we use it with our existing solutions? I don't know. We've probably got elemental users in here and Gutenberg use and Beaver Builder and all these other different tools that we can use to publish.
How, does it all work? How does it hang
[00:19:23] Ricky Robinson: Yeah, absolutely. yeah, you, you grab the, plugin. at the moment it's downloadable from, our website. We haven't got it on the, the WordPress directory, at the moment, easy to instal. it'll set up a custom post type for you. So you've got your, posts, pages, and it adds another type.
They're called stories. and then when you go, add new story, it'll all be familiar, the, that kind of, dashboard editor part of the process looks Exactly. Exactly, as you'd be used to, if you're using Gutenberg or Tiny mc in the old days, add a story. And at that point, when you add the story, you get the shorthand editing experience, right?
And the shorthand editor is, really designed, so number one, it's not a website builder. So unlike, Elementor, or outside of WordPress, if you're looking at tools like, Webflow and Framer and such, it is not a website builder. It is really, aimed at, editorial grade content.
So it is for brand publishers, news publishers who are doing editorial content, right? and so the editor is really optimised for that kind of content. So you are there to create a story. You are not there to drag pixels around and place pixels and move widgets. you are there to, to tell a story. And so what the shorthand editor gives you is, a bunch of, what we call section types and each of those section types.
I guess you can that sort of a parallel to and go blocks. but each of those has a kind of a layout and a behaviour, right? And so the, combination of those things provides the, dynamic, interactivity that you get as you scroll through, a shorthand story. and sorry,
[00:21:28] Nathan Wrigley: No, I was just gonna say f So I'm taking my intuition here from the, screenshots that I'm looking at on the homepage. And it looks, so I imagine, dear listener, that you've, you've clicked the, add new story. You are, you're dropped into s the closest comparison I can go for would be a page builder.
So there's this, different ui, and on the left you seem to have, I'm gonna call them cards. It's probably not, that's probably not the right word, but cards which you stack up and they, I presume, are like chapters in a story if you like. And, okay, this one leads to this one and what have you.
And then it looks like you're dragging components into those cards. So backgrounds, images, text, maybe there's more rich media that you can drop in, like video and audio and those kind of things. And then I presume that you bind, let's say a click on the text element, a heading to a thing, I dunno, a scroll event or something like that.
Am I getting it right? Is it, that if you do this action, this thing occurs, we move to this next card and all of that stuff.
[00:22:32] Ricky Robinson: basically e exactly it. So you build up your story with these cards, which we call sections. and each of those sections is, a, section type. And so those section types control, is this image gonna reveal as it comes in, right? As you're scrolling the page? for the most part, most of the interactions in shorthand are, triggered just by scrolling, because again, this is like an editorial experience, right?
So what you wanna do is, especially if you're on a phone, you've just got people scrolling with their thumb, right? And so what you wanna do is create this experience that keeps the reader scrolling and hopefully taking in what what the storyteller is trying to communicate. And so
[00:23:18] Nathan Wrigley: I see.
[00:23:19] Ricky Robinson: we, like it is very much linear. It's like a fiction book. It's get from chapter one through to the end, basically. Okay.
And then there are interactions. There's a few of them, there's a, carousel for example, that, you can scroll the other way. there's a few clickable things you can embed, anything into a shorthand story. So YouTube, video, you name it, widget, you just pop the URL in and you've, got that interaction there in your shorthand story as well.
and so you can, you can have more like interactive, experiences through embedding those or, just popping those, third party widgets in. but for the most part, what we're trying to do is help the storyteller to, to create the best possible story, the best na possible narrative for the particular thing that they're trying to communicate to their audience, right?
and so sometimes it might just be really nice text and, a text section in shorthand, because of, what our customers expect is, the, Rolls-Royce experience, right? So even the text sections are like really nice to look at when you're scrolling them.
but others may be, a really rich combination of different section types, right? And again, it's possible to overdo that. and there's, there's, a bit of taste involved there. And now of course, there's the AI Creative Companion, which really helps all the, layout stuff.
So yeah, you get that in the plugin as well.
[00:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: So the beauty of these things is that they do these wonderful things, but the difficulty with these things is that you often begin with a, let's say blank canvas. you've got this, you've got this wonderful idea. I wanna execute on this story. I, know in my head what this story is, but translating that into shorthand, is, I imagine fraught with difficulty.
there's a learning curve. You've gotta figure out how these components drop in and how to resize them, reshape them, and, how to make a background merge and fade and all of that kind of stuff. Do you have, do you have like knowledge base articles or videos which kind of walk people through this sort of stuff?
Or do you, also have like templates to kickstart your endeavours if you, I don't know. There, there might be something which fits perfectly. You click a button and basically amend the text and swap out the images. Do, you help people in those kind of ways?
[00:26:00] Ricky Robinson: Correct. All of the above. yeah, if you know what you're doing, start from a blank canvas and build up your story from scratch. or you can start with one of our many templates. and, they're a good starting point to see like what's possible with shorthand as well. and then we've got like an import feature.
You can import any URL or PDF, drop it in, and then apply like our AI creative Companion get it to do a first cut layout and maybe it gets you, 70, 75% of the way to way you
[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: Wait, you drop in A PDF, so you just basically mock it up in something like Figma, export it as a PDF and it will have a stab at mapping the different PDF pages to the different, I used cards sections, Okay. That's
[00:26:49] Ricky Robinson: Yeah, totally. So that's fairly new. and I gotta tell you, it's getting better and better, all the time. but yeah, the, the, and then the other way you can start, if if you're not wanting to start with the template or, or a blank canvas or an existing webpage, you can just, prompt the AI to say, Hey, here's, some context about this subject I wanna write about.
Maybe here are a few images, but also, go and fetch images from Unsplash or wherever, and it'll lay out the story for you as a first cut. so there's lots of ways to get started and to get you to, a good starting point. But storytelling really is a human endeavour, right? And so
[00:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:27:43] Ricky Robinson: always encourage you to if you are using the ai, please, go in there, make it, your own, you said that's what your audience is there for.
They're not, here to read, what the bots have written.
[00:27:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The day, when storytelling is all done by AI is the day I think I give up. yeah. Okay. I'm really glad that you said that. So this feels like it would be a, real collaborative effort. maybe you'd saddle this onto an individual, a particularly creative individual, but it also feels like there'd be quite a lot of, back and forth.
I don't know, the financial department needs to chuck the data in and the creative department needs to put the, assets in and I don't know. Then the developers wanna come in and throw their JavaScript at it so that it, behaves in a certain way. Are there, collaborative components to this?
can we, for example, I dunno, comment on particular bits of the, sections and then, I don't know, assign that to a particular person, like AKA Google Docs kind of thing.
[00:28:40] Ricky Robinson: Yep. Absolutely. So commenting, real, time collaboration. So we've gotta jump on WordPress 7.0 on that one. and we've had that real time collaboration in there for four, five years now. and as you can, imagine a lot harder technical problem than doing that for, Google Docs.
and 'cause you've got all this fancy stuff happening all over the place, right? And you've gotta, that's all gotta be, kept intact as multiple people are editing the same story at the same time. So yeah, there's, lots of different ways to collaborate, comments, the real time editing, but also, it is a place where, to your point, this kind of, high-end editorial grade storytelling is definitely a team sport.
you've got your editor in there, you've got your, maybe your journalist is in there, you've got your photo editor. and all those people come together, on the same canvas and they can create, something that kind of looks a million dollars
together. And now you've got your agents as well.
[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. to enable agents to do this as well. so that's not too far away, right?
talking to the computer and the computer can do things for you. The, the other thing I suppose in here is the level of expertise that's required, because I think quite a lot of people that dabble in WordPress, I know that quite a lot of people listening to this podcast, they'll think that something like this is maybe in the bounds only of developers.
I dunno if you wanna speak to that. what's the level of technical expertise that you have to have. for example, is this very much like a JavaScript thing that if you want to get into the weeds, you have to understand JavaScript. Do you leverage modern CSS or can you confidently say you don't need any technical skills really to pull most of this stuff off?
If you've got technical skills, it'll be icing on the cake, but mostly it's for novices.
[00:30:46] Ricky Robinson: that's exactly it. It's the icing on the cake. You do, not need that. And that, that, that was the genesis of the idea of shorthand, right? Is, we wanted to make it possible for originally news orgs to do this without, taking up a lot of developer time. 'cause those guys are busy.
and often your designers are stretched and busy as well. and we wanted to make it possible for the editors, the writers, to do as much of it for themselves as possible. But you're always gonna get that better result if you, someone that's got a design eye and, that sort of, that talent for making something, look really great.
always great if you can pinch a bit of their time to,
[00:31:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:31:35] Ricky Robinson: to have a look over it.
[00:31:36] Nathan Wrigley: people.
[00:31:37] Ricky Robinson: yes.
[00:31:38] Nathan Wrigley: I have the design skills of a potato, essentially. And, but, very often with these kind of tools, the templating system and the, it's drag and droppable and the fact that everything's available. All the tools are simple to understand. And what have you, do, you use, do you literally put stuff on the canvas?
hang on, let me rewind. Can you edit, maintain this sort of stuff in a mobile phone? Or are we definitely in desktop territory here? If we wanna build these kind of things? Do we need the granularity of a mouse and a keyboard to place things on the canvas and make it work correctly?
[00:32:13] Ricky Robinson: I would recommend doing it on the desktop. just, yeah, because often these, stories can be quite epic. so they're, long often they're long form, a lot of them, and so you're doing a lot of work. The other thing is that it's actually, it's much easier to see what a mobile phone view is gonna look like from the desktop than it is to see what the desktop version is gonna look like from the
mobile, right?
So when you are, when you're creating this thing, you need to make sure it's gonna work across every device and whatever. That's one of the things that you get for free for shorthand, is you throw all the stuff in, it does all the magic effects and everything, and it works on every device and every browser.
[00:32:56] Nathan Wrigley: So responsive controls you, you've built in some, Absolutely. It's all optimised to the hilt. So upload an image, it creates a whole bunch of different break points for those, different versions of the image. portrait landscape puts all of that together in the h and l, so you don't need to touch any code. if you, don't want, if you need to do something bespoke that we don't have out of the box, then Yep.
[00:33:24] Ricky Robinson: you can jump into the custom code editor
[00:33:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, go.
for it. Yeah, one of the things that WordPresses really love is the fact that they own their own data. And a minute ago you said that really, it sounds like flicking A DNS switch, you were able to be Christie's for a while. And that made me think, okay. That's curious. So the data is on the shorthand side, so I'm wondering for the WordPress implementation, is the data inside the WordPress database or is it an i is the final content like an iframe, which references the shorthand, database somewhere?
I, think you know where I'm going with that.
[00:33:59] Ricky Robinson: Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, So all the editing happens on our app. but then, historically in shorthand, we've tried to be really agnostic as to how you publish those stories. 'cause all of these big news orgs back in the day, they all had different, CMSs, often homegrown. and we needed a way for them to be able to publish, right?
So we have, we offered, shorthand hosting, we offer, zip downloads. did have an, we had an older short, WordPress plugin and an older Drupal plugin. But that was really more of a, you do everything in shorthand and then you publish it to WordPress, or you publish it to Drupal, right?
This new WordPress plugin completely flips that around. So it's now like a WordPress experience. Your, in WordPress in your existing workflow. You never have to leave, right? And so it's, really a, build it in WordPress and publish it in WordPress experience. When you press publish in shorthand for WordPress, that story comes across to WordPress.
It's all on the WordPress side, that point. So when a reader, comes to your website, they're loading all of that webpage off of your WordPress server, not, from shorthand.
[00:35:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So the, editing experience, it sounds like when you drop into the editor, so when you click add story, it sounds like your eye framing your editor, and then the, content is created over there. Presumably there's, business reasons for that and also maybe technical reasons to make it snappy and what have you.
Yeah. you've got a lot of JavaScript flying around, I imagine, and, yeah. Anyway, so sorry. And then when you publish it, that final publishing moment or, republish or update or whatever it may be, that is then put into the WordPress database. So if you were to drop all the WordPress database tables, that stuff is gone.
maybe it's recoverable. I don't know, maybe you keep a copy of it over on the shorthand side, but ha, have I basically captured that correctly?
[00:36:05] Ricky Robinson: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, it would, it, it would be recoverable if for some reason your shorthand, sorry, your WordPress site got destroyed somehow.
[00:36:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Drop tables. Yeah.
[00:36:18] Ricky Robinson: yeah, you've, you've, always got the, copy of it over on the shorthand edit, and you can just reconnect it to WordPress when you've got it back up and running and republish.
[00:36:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so why now then with WordPress? It sounds like you've, had a stab at this with Drupal and WordPress. What's been the, what's been the, sort of business focus from your end to think, okay, now it's time to take the plunge with WordPress? I could imagine a bunch of reasons, but I'm curious as to why now, from your perspective.
[00:36:48] Ricky Robinson: there, there are a few. one of the most popular ways for people to publish stories is using our embed. you press publish in shorthand, it publishes to our hosting, and you get an embed code, right? And you can drop that embed code in any other webpage. So it's a really convenient way to publish, but it's not always the most optimal way.
And so we're always encouraging our customers to okay, like maybe you wanna start with embed, but eventually you should, you should upgrade to a better publishing solution, which is loading that content natively. So it's faster load time, it's loading off your servers. You got more control over what happens with it, right?
if you've got a post processing, step to it, which, the BBC does, you can do that. you can min manipulate that content off, once it's off of shorthand. and so for we, we realised that we had, a bunch of customers who have WordPress and they're using this embed method, and so it's let's give these guys a, a better way to do this.
But also WordPress is still what, like 42% of the
[00:38:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:38:08] Ricky Robinson: right? And it's, it's, and it's not going anywhere, right? Like you've got all these newer, these newer CMSs and newer tools, WordPress is it's still the top dog. and so we thought, look, let's, make, it possible to do this high-end storytelling directly in WordPress.
and then, and, then folks don't have to jump back and forward between shorthand and WordPress and all of that rigmarole, just to publish a story.
[00:38:44] Nathan Wrigley: how just that little thing, which honestly doesn't sound like a lot, okay, go over to shorthand.com, do your editing, get a code, get in bed, JavaScript in bed, whatever it may be, paste it in over here. It, that's just too much for, for a, solo developer, that's fine.
they've got all of the bits and pieces they need to do that, but once you're in an editorial team workflow, nobody, like, where, what, how do we do that? What's going on? You just need to be able to log in to the familiar place where you always log in, do the stuff that you need to do, and then somebody finally goes, yeah, it's finished, hit publish in the familiar way.
Okay. Yep. And then, you don't have to manage the seats on a third party platform and all of that, right? So there's none of that. and so it's just, yeah, so for time strapped folks, which, everyone is those, just making that, that whole flow as friction free as possible was, a big deal.
[00:39:40] Ricky Robinson: Yeah.
[00:39:41] Nathan Wrigley: The way that we've described it over the last 40 minutes or so, it feels like we've bound it to narrative and we've bound it to like news stories and possibly fiction, that kind of stuff. But it occurs to me that maybe there's a much wider use for it. So here we are, a podcast, right?
You, I can imagine this episode could be a totally legitimate use of this. here's, here's Ricky. Ricky has a plugin. We scroll a bit, this is the plugin. Here's some links, here's some yada, and then here's the podcast audio, and here's the video that we shot when we did a sort of screencast about it and that kind of thing.
So what I'm trying to say is, if you are listening to this and you're thinking, this isn't for me 'cause I don't do news and I don't do stories, I'm just really handing it over to you to say, tell us about some interesting use cases that some of your clients have used that maybe will give some of our listeners an as a, broader
[00:40:38] Ricky Robinson: Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I'd, to jump on, the, inspiration examples on our, on our website. and we've broken that down by, different use cases. but yes, so the, podcast use cases is really interesting. we've had, a bunch of customers doing that.
often they're news organisations, but also, nonprofits, and that kind of thing. But shorthand today is used for all kinds of things. Even you wouldn't necessarily think of them as stories. our, largest customer, which is I think the world's largest investment bank and not, allowed to say their name, but, yeah, they, their, their, primary use case was, really high-end sales proposals.
and so we, we recently learned that we, we improved their win rate by 12% Wow. yeah, so, not something that you'd, naturally think of as, a use case for shorthand, but we've got multiple big customers using it for that.
[00:42:02] Nathan Wrigley: That's really interesting. 'cause the sales process for buying a pair of trainers is, show me the trainers, have you got the colour? I like, do you have the size? I like click buy or not, but I'm imagining in the case of an investment bank, this is probably months, possibly years of work, which needs to be distilled into this moment, this single moment where maybe billions of dollars are on it and investing the time to get that just right.
That's so interesting.
[00:42:33] Ricky Robinson: Yeah. that's, that, that's one that, we've been thinking about for a while and, now that's becoming, more common to do with shorthand. The other huge one, is, annual reports and other kinds of reports. So you name a nonprofit, they're likely doing their annual report, with shorthand or, their, web version of, their annual report with, shorthand.
and so again, why? they spend a lot of money on these things doing the PDF version, and no one reads them.
[00:43:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Yeah.
[00:43:11] Ricky Robinson: And so it's Hey,
[00:43:13] Nathan Wrigley: are they?
[00:43:14] Ricky Robinson: yeah. And so it's how do we make this more interesting? So the football association will do their annual report, the FA does their annual reports with, shorthand, right?
[00:43:24] Nathan Wrigley: the UK fa, the Football Association. Oh, nice.
[00:43:28] Ricky Robinson: So I think, that one's on our example site
[00:43:32] Nathan Wrigley: huge. Yeah.
[00:43:33] Ricky Robinson: but yeah.
[00:43:35] Nathan Wrigley: jazz it up a bit, essentially you're in the, you're in the attention market really, aren't you? With this tool, you're trying to keep people going from start to finish and, and it turns out that movement and, things which are not static and things scrolling around and updating themselves in real time.
We appear to be a species that love that kind of stuff. we just do. Oh, that's
[00:44:00] Ricky Robinson: yep. Absolutely. So it's attention and, that reputation piece. And they go hand in hand. and so yeah, lots and lots of annual reports and, ESG reports and whatever other reports these corporations and nonprofits have to do. again, lots of examples of those on, our homepage, if you wanna check
[00:44:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so, here's, an intuition that I have, and this is not directed at you, Ricky. This is directed at you, dear listener. I feel there's like a whole upsell thing here going on, where you could really go to your existing clients and figure out a way to, I don't know, just just, it's an ancillary service.
It's, yeah, we do your website, but we've got this new thing, we've got this new tool we've invested in, and we feel that your shareholders or your, constituents or whatever it may be, might benefit from this kind of stuff. And it feels like another string to your bow. so the agency owners and the freelancers out there, this feels like another new thing.
it's a, it's another good reason to write an email or pick up the phone to your existing clients. Say, we got this thing, it's
[00:45:07] Ricky Robinson: yep. I'll,
I'll
[00:45:09] Nathan Wrigley: that, and the other. Yeah. Yeah. That's
[00:45:11] Ricky Robinson: And I, I'll, plug one of our, one of our agency partners, so Harpoon, which is a UK based agency, they run their, whole business is creating shorthand stories for their clients.
[00:45:22] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:45:23] Ricky Robinson: and Har Harpoon is, is, run and owned by the founder of BBC Magazine.
[00:45:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, he's got some chops.
[00:45:32] Ricky Robinson: so yeah, so Gil Giles Wilson, and he does fantastic work. and yeah, it, really is a platform that you can go to your existing customers and say, Hey, let's, elevate some of this existing content that we've got. and we, we have, several customers that, that use shorthand for that.
They'll take their, older content and they want to give it new life. and so they'll do the shorthand version of it. And of course you can get started pretty easy 'cause you've got the import function. Okay. So you don't even need new content. You can just recycle the stuff, which has been lying around and has been cogitated and mulled over a million times.
yeah, you might need to find some, new, depending how old it is, what's the resolution on those images, so you need some, some, high res images to, to do a good job of it usually.
[00:46:30] Nathan Wrigley: the curious thing here is that I, I think as the years go on, I am, without a doubt, I am seeing more of this content and it's cro so it, it really was the exclusive domain of those massive news organisations that you mentioned. like the New York Times and the BBC. They were the only places that I saw it.
And now I'm seeing it creeping in. And when it creeps in this way, I presume that the expectation from most people is how are they doing that? how can we have a bit of that? If that's got a, 12% uplift on these major banks and all that, maybe we need to try that out as well. And, it, there's no doubt you're, the attention economy is a real thing.
You are competing against the likes of TikTok and what have you. And if the website is your primary vehicle for pitching or sales or whatever it may be, then this is, really interesting. I'm just gonna, just before we knock it on the head, I'll, I'll just mention the URL into the record.
Again, I've said it a couple of times, but here we go. One more time. It's shorthand.com. You're not gonna forget that in a hurry. That's easy. but there is a post which I will link to, which I found, which is to do with the, this brand new plugin for WordPress. 'cause that's probably where the WordPresses in this crowd are gonna end up.
So you can go and check that out. And, any word on pricing at the moment? Have you got all that nailed down? How does that work?
[00:47:52] Ricky Robinson: so at the moment, it's, we're using the, existing pricing. So the same pricing as, shorthand, classic as it were. and that's shorthand.com/pricing.
[00:48:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, and we, we may evolve that pricing as we get a few more work shorthand for WordPress customers and, talk to them about what makes sense for you.
Okay. And it looks, it just looking at the forward slash pricing, it looks like the, it's like a seat membership kind of thing. the number of seats and all of those kind of tiers. Yeah,
[00:48:28] Ricky Robinson: Yeah. it's number of stories and it starts from like 50. Yeah. It starts from $50 a month if you're paying annually,
[00:48:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yep. Yep. Okay. In which case, go and check it out shorthand.com. At what an interesting tool. I, I really hope this takes off for you. I, I, expect it will. I've got this intuition, so I don't often get that excited, but this one's really got me, especially as I'm in the podcasting space and I can totally see an overlap for stories done in audio.
we're having a conversation, so it's, it fits less. But so many podcasts that I listen to, like history podcast, there's a thread. There's a total thread and embellishing that podcast with, a bit of a map or a bit of a description. here's a graphic showing the battle that we're talking about today and all that kinda stuff.
That's why I'm excited 'cause I can see where, I can see where this could be implemented in ways that I would certainly be engaged by. So shorthand.com. Ricky Robinson, thanks for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.
[00:49:31] Ricky Robinson: Thank you very much, Nathan. Thanks for having me.
[00:49:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got time for today.
Just a couple of quick plugs, wpbuilds.com/advertise, if you would like to find out about sponsoring the WP Builds podcast. But also /subscribe if you just wanna keep updated. We do two shows each week. This Week in WordPress comes on a Monday, and then it's produced as a podcast episode on the Tuesday, and you are listening to the Thursday episode. You will get emails for both of those if you fill out the subscribe form.
Okay, that's all I've got for you today. I'm gonna fade in some dreadful, cheesy music and say stay safe. You have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
