Using Blogger to communicate youth group news isn’t really a new idea. I know of several churches that use it quite effectively. However, a new blogging platform called Terapad has just released and, in my opinion, seems to offer a much better solution for youth group websites than Blogger.
Here’s what’s automatically integrated into Terapad that’s lacking in Blogger:
- Ready-to-go Paypal shop (great for students to pay for trips and events)
- Image gallery
- Discussion forums
- Visitor tracking
- Event calendar
- Easy to create pages (to offer downloadable forms, for example)
- Built-in integration with Flickr, Feedburner, Paypal, del.icio.us, digg.com, and other services
I set up an account and had a site up and running within two or three minutes. The administrative area of the site is pretty intuitive and looks very easy to manage. Their selection of website templates also looks very professional and attractive for youth oriented sites.
The free account comes with 10 GB of bandwidth and 2 GB of storage, although it also places Google ads on your site. If you want them removed it’ll cost ya $5/month, but they’ll throw in an additional 10 GB of data transfer for the price, too.
Visit www.terapad.com for more info.
[tags]Terapad[/tags]
About me: I am married to my beautiful wife, 
January 9th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
I couldn;t agree more… I’ve been using it for two days now. Amazing stuff! Best of luck with the site.
January 9th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Yeah, I thought Terapad was pretty slick, too, although it’s comparison to Wordpress is a little unfair.
January 10th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
hmm, i bookmarked it, i will definately check it out later! thanks for the review!
Seriously, is it easy for not so tech-savvy people like me?
Peace!
January 10th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Seriously, it’s pretty easy. The only slightly confusing thing you might find is that they label the tab for site templates as “CSS.” Although that’s the correct techy name for it, it could throw off non-techy users who have never heard of Cascading Style Sheets. Using the templates, though, is no problem.
The account is free, so try it out and see what you think. Ya got nothing to lose.
January 10th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Thanks for visiting the blog. Your comments are always welcomed.
April 8th, 2007 at 5:27 am
Hi there! Thank you for the review. Since you wrote about it we’ve upgraded the bandwidth to 20 Gig/month, and 40 Gig/month when subscribed. The ‘CSS’ tab has also been reorganized in a ‘layout’ tab, following your comment. Thanks again!
April 8th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Wow, that’s great, Stephan! Thanks for the update.