Service Saturday: Terapad

As of today, three major blog hosting services are Blogger, WordPress.com and Typepad. The former two are free while the latter is paid.

Every once in a while a new startup emerges which attempts to enter this market. Some succeed, while others fail.

Two days back one such startup launched. However, as it’s tagline suggests, Terapad offers you a lot more than just blogging. Besides the blog you have a content management system, a complete hosting system to save your own images and pages with 2GB space, forums, a shop, even calendar and career tools all rolled into a single system! Only downside is the ads.

I am impressed! Let’s look at everything in detail.

Signing Up

I signed up for an account and got hold of http://ajaydsouza.terapad.com/

Signing up for Terapad was easy and I was setup with my account in a jiffy.

You can select the subdomain and the system automatically generates the username for you. This I believe is to reduce the attempt of someone hacking your account. Though, I don’t really like the username generated.

You also have eight templates to choose from which can be customized later.

Signing In

They don’t have a link on their homepage that lets you signin, but you do get it in your welcome email. You can signin at http://<username>.terapad.com/cpanel

The Interface

On logging in you are presented with a neat and clean interface. You have a row of tabbed buttons at the top of the screen which makes navigating throughout the system easy as you can see in the screenshot below.

Editors
You are allowed to add extra editors and assign different rolls to them. So you can be the overall admin and have different persons handly different sections of your site.

Stats
Gives you a small trend of the number of visitors to your site. It also lets you know how much resources i.e. bandwidth and storage you have left. You have 2GB of storage space. You are given 330MB bandwidth per day.

CSS
This is what will give your site its individual look. The functionality is similar to what WordPress.com is offering today, but you don’t have to pay for that.
You have no template editting features like Blogger, so you need to have a fair understanding of CSS in order to customize your site.

Billing
Terapad.com is ad-supported via the visitor-friendly Google Adsense. You can still remove them for a small fee of $5.00 per month. You also get 10 Gigabytes of monthly bandwith to your account when you sign up!

Settings
The crux of the control you have. You can choose which site modules are activated, integrate with third party tools such as Google Analytics, modify your search engine information, etc.

The lower set of tabs i.e. Blog, BlogRoll, Pages etc. is to control individual sections of the site.

I’ve yet to test out each of these sections which I intend to do in detail.

But as of now Terapad definitely gets two thumbs up.