Disclaimer: This Designrr review does not contain any affiliate links, nor do I profit from this in any way. This review is an honest one and entirely for your benefit.
Last updated 2020
Like a lot of people who run online businesses, I create PDF reports on an almost on a weekly basis – and it’s a slow and boring process.
And because I want them to look ‘just right’, I don’t outsource the mind-numbingly mundane task to anybody else.
I’m probably being overly concerned about the brand.
Anyway, typically, I take a blog post and re-purpose it into an ebook that I can give away for free, to entice people to subscribe to my mailing list.
It’s a good strategy that works well, but I keep thinking the process could be a lot quicker. I don’t want to give my subscribers a boring run-of-the-mill PDF.. I want mine to stand out from the crowd.
And then I found ‘Designrr’… an application that claims to help you create beautiful ebooks in seconds.
Awesome. Despite the silly name I love the idea.
Quick and easy to use
It works like this:
You paste the URL of your blog post into Designrr, choose a template, and the content is automatically pulled in. You can then tweak it and save it as a PDF.
That’s massive time saver right?
Right! In this regard, it delivers and does what it promises.
Buggy software
Problems arise when trying to go beyond the basic templates provided.
If you try to do anything too creative, like add your own branding, things get real buggy real fast.
Frustratingly, I’ve had to scrap countless projects and start again from scratch. And I still haven’t managed to finish a project or get an ebook to look how I want it to.
And it’s not actually a genuine ebook – yes it’s a PDF, but it can’t generate a table of contents which is essential for usability, in longer reports.
What you end up with is a fairly basic PDF, made up of text. Adding images, or changing the default template cover, leads to problems.
Now this is great if you want to make reports easily and quickly, and don’t care too much about the layout.
But if you’re looking for something with a bit more design flair, it’s probably better to look elsewhere.
Bottom line
So does it provide good value for money?
That depends on what you want to do with the platform.
This is obviously not for someone who’s bored of how traditional PDF’s look… but for a newbie that needs something fast, or if you need to make content upgrades in a hurry, this is a fantastic application.