TypePad Reviewer's Comments

Watch your stats, promote your blog and make money with TypePad, a Six Apart product. Our “TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award” winner is cheap, at less than $5 per month for the basic membership, yet TypePad offers advanced tools like statistics, word banning, text file uploads and you can publish an About page.

Typepad is a good tool for bloggers that are looking for exposure; this service can submit your blog to Google, Technorati, FeedBurner and more. If you want to keep your blog private they also support private and password protected blogs. Unlike many free blogs, TypePad does not put ads on your site unless you request them.

This service is comparable to WordPress, but doesn’t obtain the number one spot, because it is not free and they offer few customization features without upgrading to their Pro package.

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Blog Design Tools:  

TypePad offers few template options without an upgrade but posting is easy and straightforward. It has a text editor as well as an HTML editor with a preview. You can easily insert images, links, files or an email link. Inserting an image and changing its properties is simple.

They offer more layouts than most, four standard and four mixed media layouts that support photos, text, video and audio entries. It also has more sidebar options than most, including photo albums, subscribe links, podcast links, category clouds and a variety of third party widgets.

The element we did not like about TypePad is that you have to upgrade to submit unique templates or to change the code of the templates.

Promotion/ Tracking Tools:  

This service costs a bit but offers more promotional tools than most services. For example, this service can automatically submit your blog and updates to Google and Technorati, as well as directories like blo.gs and weblogs.com. It can also submit through your FeedBurner account.

It offers the best statistics that we have seen, including total page views, average views per day, views in the last week and recent views. They also track referrers by post, including the time of the visit and it tracks your photo album traffic stats. TypePad stats are accurate to within five minutes.

Ease of Use:  

Although this product is generally easy–to–use and does not require coding experience, some aspects are a bit confusing. One is the type list feature, through this feature you can add supplemental information like links or email addresses. We looked at their help pages to try to figure out how to add a graphic to a list, but never figured out how to get it displayed.

However, most features of this service are user friendly and their interface is clean and well–organized.

Technical Help/Support:  

You can get help from FAQs, tutorials, documentation or by reading weblogs. If you cannot find the information that you are looking for you can contact them by email and request a help ticket for individualized assistance.

Summary:  

TypePad is a no–nonsense, practical service with great promotion and tracking tools.