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]

Posted on January 9, 2007