Terapad In…Wordpress out? A Short Interview with TP

Before you comment….YES we do realize that we use Wordpress, This is an article to inform users that there are other options when starting a blog (or switching). Good ones too. In the end you be the judge.

So, how did Terapad get started?

Well, originally the Terapad engine was used by our developers to build corporate website for small businesses. As it’s a centralized framework, it allowed us to progressively add more and more features to our offering, such as online shop, forums, blog, image gallery, forums, etc. while keeping the cost very low for our customers.

Eventually we realized we had something very different on our hands and opened it up to the public, including both individuals and SMBs with ‘hands-on’ skills. So far the feedback has been fantastic and a lot of the features requested by the users have made it in the product.

Why did Terapad decide to venture into the blogging market when the
general public has access to many tried and tested applications?

Users see content as content, regardless if it’s a blog post, multimedia, or an item they want to sale. So far, the applications provided to manage an individual’s or small business online presence have been very fragmented: a Wordpress blog, a Flickr gallery, a PhpBB forum, an Ebay shop and so on.

To reproduce what you could do with a single Terapad site, you would need 8 different applications, each with their own login, design, learning curve and of course inherent cost. Terapad integrates all these elements under one roof, for free, with one simple interface and the look and feel of your choice. Blogging is just one of the things you can do with Terapad, but you could disable that module entirely if you wanted to.

So, to answer your question directly, we did not ‘choose’ to venture in the blogging market, we just added a blogging module to our existing software platform. The bloggers did the rest. We’re happy to see so many bloggers choose our service, and we have recently added import features from Wordpress and LiveJournal.

What features set you apart from other blogging softwares? ie.
Wordpress, MovableType

Where other platforms stop is where Terapad starts.

With Terapad you could blog collaboratively of course, since we support everything you already use today: multiple editors, RSS, tagging, blog pings, comment tracking. We also throw in a couple of nice features such as scheduling, and our spam filter uses advanced automated technology so you’ll never have to worry about comment spam again. No need for plugins such as Akismet, etc. In fact, no need for plugins, period.

It’s Guy Kawasaki who said that after the 10th post, blog content starts to ‘disappear’. Not with Terapad. We give you a versatile content management system that comes complete with search engine optimization, audit trail, and versionning. You can create as many pages and organize them in as many categories as you want.

But that’s just for starters. After your blog is established, you might want to start creating revenue by selling the things you blog about, such as gadgets or what lies around your attic. You could also opt to sell art, software you wrote, subscriptions to content, or even general merchandise to promote your site such as TShirts, etc. It only takes a Paypal email address to set up shop, and we don’t take any cuts on the sales, so unlike EBay or CafePress all the revenue stay yours.

Terapad also comes with an image gallery and a multimedia asset manager with 2Gb of space for your videos, mp3s, etc. All this content can then be placed in any other of the other sites modules via a WYSIWYG editor that requires no technical knowledge to use.

Then, we have the forums, you could use them as a platform to offer support, or simply a way to make your site ’stickier’ and build a community around it. It’s there if you need it.

We also have a very versatile event calendar tool, some people use it to advertise events such as concerts and parties, others as a multimedia archive of past events such as corporate meetings or videos from their kids’ birthday.

If you’re an small business, or simply a very popular site, you could even start hiring via the careers tools, which come complete with resume indexing and a built-in search engine. As you can see, Terapad scales with what you do. You can start small with ‘just a blog’ and grow all the way to an established business presence.

I’m going to stop here because we have too many features to list in just one blog post. Let’s just say that every module in Terapad was originally built as a stand alone application, so naturally if you wanted to just operate a blog, a shop, a job board or whatever else you have in mind, you could, and did I mention it was free?

Is it possible to host your software on a server other than Terapads?

No, at the moment we’re a hosted solution only. Imagine the money and trouble we’re saving you by monitoring the software 24/7 and picking up your bandwidth bill.

Can users customize your code, create templates and create
add-ons/widgets?

This is another thing we do differently at Terapad: you don’t change your layout using HTML, you change it using what should be used to edit a modern, web 2.0 design: Cascading Style Sheets. Any layout is possible. We spent three months in creating the most flexible framework found in an online publishing solution. Designers can go nuts, and geeks also have access to the underlying xHTML code generated by the WYSIWYG editor.

For non-technical users who may not like dabbling in CSS, we have built-in templates of course. In fact, here’s an announcement exclusive to the Intowit.com readers: in three weeks we’re going to release 20 further templates to complement what’s already there!

As for Widgets, we integrate with absolutely anything. Google Analytics, Technorati, click maps software, audio widgets such as Sonific and even widgets aggregators such as Snipperoo.

Why would an established blogger want to switch from Wordpress to Terapad?

Simply because the myriads of specialized applications out there are like Lego blocks that don’t fit with each other. Terapad on the other hand provide an integrated, enterprise-level solution to all your publishing needs.

You could also switch because you like our feature set, or because of cost. We’re free, ad-supported via the discrete Google Adsense but you can remove the ads for only 5$ a month. Power users can save hundreds of dollars a year just by using our service.

Visit Terapad and see for yourself

Thanks to:
Stephan Taul and Terapad Co-Founder Justin Dean

 

 

 

 

 

Share This    Sphere It