TypePad is a Blog Service for Web Publishers, Writers, Individuals, Businesses and maintained by Typepad, Inc.
TypePad Summary
TypePad is a paid blogging service perfect for personal and business use with free trial period of 30 days. Its vantage from other competitors is its superb tracking and promotion capabilities, allowing users to gain presence in search engines if they choose to. In addition, TypePad allows social media optimization through Facebook, Twitter, and Bit.ly, as well as blogging through mobile phones, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android-powered devices. Like other blog services, typepad comes in 3 different paid versions after a free 30 day trial to test how typepad works, users can upgrade at any time to access better features.
TypePad Features
Starting off with the blog design tool, TypePad offers a neat content-creation area where you can insert links, images, videos, files, and email links. The text editor can be viewed in rich-text or HTML version, allowing you to play with the look of how your post will appear. You can set a title with editable permalink, choose a category for your post, enable or disable the commenting option, write an excerpt, and provide keywords and Technorati tags. Of course, you can save an unfinished post as draft, and if you want to make blogging speedy, there is a bookmarklet you can drag to your bookmarks bar, which you can click whenever you have something to blog about.
The overview page of your blog shows you the statistics, which is very informative. It shows you daily pageviews, lifetime pageviews, total posts, total comments, and social media traffic. TypePad submits your blog automatically to Technorati and Google, as well as weblogs and your FeedBurner account, if you have one. You can also insert a Google Analytics code snippet if you want more sophisticated tracking of your visitors.
TypePad also enables you to fully customize the look of your blog. You can choose an appropriate background for your blog from hundreds of free templates, and a header or banner image can be uploaded to personalize it more. The settings area abounds with options you can tweak. You can change the blog name anytime, or add a description to it. If you are running a personal blog, you can also password-protect your blog to make it inaccessible to the public. There are also options for SEO, add-ons, sharing, posts, categories, comments, email posts, and you can import or export your blog whenever you please.
TypePad User Interface
TypePad offers a clean and well-organized interface that will never confuse beginners. The colors you see are green, blue, and yellow, and the pages are cool to the eyes. Although there is an advertisement at the bottom of the page for free accounts, it does not interfere with the overall appearance of your blog. Everything is light and very snappy, and another good thing is that every page comes with a right sidebar containing helpful information.
TypePad Review
TypePad is another good option if you want to enter the blogging world or start an online business. You will find similar stuff with WordPress, but nothing is actually copied from this competitor and offers a unique service. The only problem is that TypePad is not free; you will have to pay once the 30-day trial elapsed. TypePad costs $8.95, $14.95, and $29.95, depending on the plan, but you can cancel anytime during the trial period if you do not like the service. Cancellation is necessary if you do not want to be billed past the trial period, since your billing information is required upon signup.
The Plus plan, which is the basic one, does not allow you to create unlimited blogs and fully customize your design, so this restriction might be a deterrent for trying the service out. However, you can rely to the customer service support very much, especially if you have the Premium account. Another great thing about TypePad is that you can use your TypeKit or OpenID username to create your account. Also, you can decline to answer whether you are male or female and hide this bit of detail. If you're looking for a free blog service, typepad is not for you but on the other hand we are not talking about an expensive service, typepad is a really good and solid choice.
One thing we still haven't touched but wanted to mention is typepad micro which aside from the paid services are entirely free but your blog space is limited to a micro blog with much less features and expansions available.