ShortStack earns our TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award for offering an exceptionally diverse set of tab templates, modules and apps. The company is designed to create do-it-yourself Facebook fan pages for individual special interests, nonprofit organizations, small businesses, corporations and third-party web designers. Additionally, ShortStack does not require programming or Photoshop expertise. You can use it to create custom Facebook pages for a monthly subscription that's a fraction of the cost of paying a web developer by the hour.
You can choose between four packages, including All You Can Eat, Full Stack, Short Stack and Surprisingly Free. What else would you expect from a company called Pancake Laboratories Inc.? When we evaluated the Short Stack package designed for individuals and small businesses, we liked that it offers attractive template designs with images that you can use for a variety of purposes and that give you the ability to upload your own designs. The Short Stack package will let you upload 10 tabs each to an unlimited number of Facebook pages. You are only limited to 25,000 fans among them all before you must upgrade to a more advanced package.
However, ShortStack's powerful design interface is not initially intuitive. We experienced some confusion when we attempted to create a reveal page tab, a tab that contains two sets of content – one that will be viewed by non-fans and another that will be viewed by those who have clicked the Like button. Even though the service displays selectable fan and non-fan buttons on each of its templates' widgets within the design interface, you actually have to go through the Options tab in the editing mode to set a widget as exclusively non-fan or fan content.
You cannot delete a tab through ShortStack but instead must delete it through your Facebook page's administration options. In addition, once a tab goes live, you cannot make changes to it. Instead, you must make a new tab with the changes you wish to reflect. We understand that ShortStack is set up this way to measure a tab's analytics, which the service provides in its more advanced packages. However, we found these factors to be somewhat of an inconvenience, particularly when many of ShortStack's competitors provide these services within their interfaces.
Despite these factors, we love ShortStack's creative widgets and apps that really capitalize on Facebook's forum. For example, the service offers poll and survey widgets. Your poll can be something entertaining to your followers, such as "Who should have won American Idol? Lauren or Scotty?" Or you can use the tool to get feedback about your products or services. Both purposes help advertise your business and maintain contact with your followers, which can lead to sales. Other examples of ShortStack's brilliant widgets include:
- Custom forms to create such modules as restaurant reservations or contact forms
- The ability for your followers to give virtual gifts to their friends
- Campaigns for your followers to invite their friends to join your page
ShortStack has established a number of partnerships with other online services such as MailChimp, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud and FourSquare. ShortStack also lets you add a hotspot, or hyperlink, to an image within your tab design. It offers rich-text widgets that let you format the font, point size, text alignment or add hyperlinks to the words in your design.
ShortStack also offers advanced tools that you can use if you are more program savvy, including a place to insert a Flash movie; HTML, Javascript, or Google Analytics code. Or use the service's iFrame widget to display an external web page inside your tab.
ShortStack offers a variety of Facebook templates and Facebook layouts – some with images and some that are only layouts with a number of column width and image placement options. You can add widgets to any of the templates, or you can insert your own images designed in Photoshop without using the templates, which is what we did when we created our tab. You can also easily insert an RSS feed from your blog, Twitter feed, video or photo collage.
When evaluating ShortStack's design interface, we didn't even have to think about its programming until we were ready to publish our tab. We thought we had developed a reveal page tab with content for both fans and non-fans, but when we saw the tab on our Facebook page, it didn't appear the way it displayed in ShortStack's preview window. However, we were able to discover what the problem was by using the service's Help menu after the fact. We deleted the first tab attempt using our Facebook page administration options. Then we applied the correct settings to a new tab in ShortStack's interface. Although we deleted the first tab through Facebook, it still appeared in ShortStack's Tab Manager.
ShortStack provides two different publishing methods: Quick Publish and Custom Publish. You can publish up to 10 tabs per page using the Quick Publish option, or you can publish unlimited tabs without the ShortStack label using Custom Publish. Custom Publish requires seeing a little more back-end communication with Facebook applications, but ShortStack provides step-by-step instructions to help you through the process.
It's clear that ShortStack has a solid partnership with Facebook, which permits them to display prompts that maintain ShortStack's pleasant rapport during the publishing process.
ShortStack's customer service team is very responsive and helpful. Its website provides a contact form, and we received a practically instantaneous response to our inquiry (although that is probably because we are a member of the media). The website also provides answers to frequently asked questions, some tutorials, a list of articles in its help section and a community forum.
Since the technology of creating a Facebook tab is so new, companies like ShortStack have the burden of not only educating its users about how to use its services, but it must explain the purpose of Facebook pages and how they can assist you in building your cause or business. It's clear to us with the creative widgets they offer that ShortStack's leadership took great care to consider the needs of their customers when designing their business plan.
ShortStack is one the most powerful tab creation services we reviewed, but its web interface is not initially intuitive. We like that it provides floating captions that describe the purpose of each of its features, but we would like to see the service add a get-started tutorial that provides a step-by-step overview of the basic processes. When we reviewed ShortStack, the service inspired us to think of ways we can customize the tools it offers to promote our own Facebook fan page.
