2 New Templates for Cycling Websites
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Tuesday, 23 June 09 - 04:19 AM (GMT) By Ces Catubay in Terapad News |
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It has been all wonderful when bikers and cycling clubs started joining the Terapad community. Its gracious to know that these website designs have been a great help for them to share their enthusiasm in the world of cycling.
A week ago, two new cycling templates were added to our design library. The two designs showcase the heart throbbing fun of bicycle racing. The prestige of the different cycling races brought us the idea of sharing this website looks for our champions.
“Cycling Race” and “Bicycle Racing” were the titles given to them as a tribute to the famous heart pounding cycling tours. Fanatics and enthusiasts of biking champions can also make use of these designs to start a website to support their idols. It would be a great way to hook cycling fans to form their own community and participate with their fellow members through the built in forum.
While we bring you these new designs, we’re expecting to bring you more in the future.
Together with USA Cycling, a national governing body for bicycle racing in United States, www.freecyclingwebsite.com was launched. FreeCyclingWebsite.com offers free websites to cycling clubs across USA and get 10% discount on all premium services. Only corporate could afford to build and own websites, but only Terapad and USA Cycling lets you do that without being corporate. Cycling clubs across the country have been searching for ways to get a professional and affordable online presence. USA Cycling took up their cause and searched for a partner in this arena, and chose Terapad as its partner.
Support now available for free accounts
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Monday, 15 June 09 - 09:07 AM (GMT) By Ces Catubay in Terapad News |
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Awhile back, the support feature was only limited to standard and pro accounts. Free account users can only ask for help by asking questions on the forum. At times, some people feel that it takes some guts and time to ask for support.
No matter how easy Terapad can be used, there are unexpected circumstances we can’t avoid. Stuck with editing a design? Changing header image? Adding scripts? Do they sound familiar? You talk, we listen and we respond. Your comments and criticisms help us to determine our weak points and improve them.
Along with the launching of the new website, a contact us for support is now open for free account owners. Yes, that’s right! You can send us your questions through the Contact Free Support Form.
If you haven’t tried this, now is the best time to send your questions. Simply fill up the form with the required information. Make sure that you correctly enter your email address because we will use this to reply to you. We encourage the standards and pro users to use the contact us form located inside your cpanel.
As much as we want to answer all of your queries, please be aware that we are dealing with thousands of requests every day. Therefore, we cannot guarantee to respond to all requests made here especially if the answer to your question is already stated in your cpanel’s help section, our FAQs, forums or how to sections of the blog.
If you need immediate assistance, we also suggest speaking with a Terapad Reseller near you. To know the nearest reseller in your area, please look in the Find a Reseller section.
Welcome to the new Terapad website
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Monday, 11 May 09 - 09:40 AM (GMT) By Justin Dean in Terapad News |
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This weekend saw the launch of the new Terapad website. We are very pleased with the result and would like to thank everyone for their feedback.
We believe that the new system is easier to navigate and presents a cleaner, brighter and more positive image for Terapad.
In addition, and as requested by many Terapad users, we have added the ability for everyone to logon to their own website's control panel direct from the Terapad main website.
Finally the whole system is available in 15 languages, making it easier than ever for people all round the world to create a free website.
- English - www.terapad.com
- Arabic - www.terapad.ae
- Chinese - www.terapad.cn
- Dutch - www.terapad.nl
- French - www.terapad.fr
- German - www.terapad.de
- Greek - www.terapad.gr
- Hindi - www.terapad.in
- Italian - www.terapad.it
- Japanese - www.terapad.jp
- Korean - www.terapad.kr
- Russian - www.terapad.ru
- Spanish - www.terapad.es
- Swedish - www.terapad.se
- Portuguese - www.terapad.com.pt
The Power of Tags on Websites
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Monday, 09 February 09 - 08:05 AM (GMT) By Ces Catubay in Terapad News |
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Tags are keywords used to describe a piece of information published on the web. Otherwise known as metadata, tags make your life easier whether you are organizing your posts or when you’re looking for a piece of information. Tags works best by filtering your posts matched by a common keyword.
Just recently, Terapad adopts the power of tags on the built-in search. Tags are better and more effective because it allows you to categorize and manage the results of a search in your website.
Here’s an example.
You opened a website for your catering business and listed the services you offer. They were categorized as weddings, corporate events, parties, private functions, barbecues. A prospect client visited your website to check if you offer healthy plate options. Upon checking the pages, he realized that there was no information relating to healthy meals. Suddenly, he saw the search box and used it for his query.
Unfortunately, there was no tag for the keywords he’s looking for. He closed the window and looked for other catering services.
The above example relates on how you can make us of tags. Adding a set of tags such as healthy, health, diet, healthy meals, etc., can greatly help. Tags can help you sort relevant information for easier browsing.
How to add tags:
There are two ways on how to add tags on your published articles. You can use both or choose the best one depending on your needs.
First Option: News Tags
Once you’re inside the control panel, click on the ‘News’ Tab. A list of your news items will be displayed on the page. Click on the ‘Edit’ button to add tags on the published items.
The tags box is located on the bottom that looks like this. 
Enter the keywords on the box and don’t forget the save button.
Second Option: Page Tags
Inside the control panel, click the ‘Pages’ tab. Navigate until you see the page that you want to enter keyword. When the WYSIWYG editor is open, click the ‘Search Engine’ tab located above the text editor and the third tab from the left. 
You will see a box labeled ‘Keywords’ wherein you can enter the tags you want to include on your website.
Keywords should be separated by commas. It is best to make the tags relevant to your articles.
You can check out Terapad’s tag cloud with the user-generated tags on the community. Bigger font means there are more posts tagged with that keyword.
Terapad under attack
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Tuesday, 03 February 09 - 08:11 AM (GMT) By Justin Dean in Terapad News |
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Late on Saturday night (GMT) Terapad servers experienced an unusually high volume of traffic and started running very slowly. Engineers were despatched to London based data centre to investigate the problem. What they found was that the system was under a direct Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack.
Our engineers braved exceptional weather conditions and have worked around the clock to bring the system back on line, which I am very grateful to them for. The attack still continues but our security measures are making the effects less obvious. The system remains slow. Further work will take place.
The last time this happened was in November 2007, at that time we were offline on and off for about 4 days. This time we are better prepared. Why people attack us is unknown, although with so many tens of thousands of sites on Terapad it is likely that one of them is the target. Regardless Terapad do intend to deliver all our data gathered by our engineers to SOCA.
If you are a client Terapad Pro account, you may be entitled to a refund under your Service Level Agreement. This will be calculated at the end of February and you will be notified by email with payment being made direct to your Paypal account.
Terapad outsource the uptime monitoring of our systems to IP Patrol. This company is entirely independent to us and in the interests of openness and to demonstrate our commitment to providing good uptime I have included a summary provided by them below.
So apologies once again from the Terapad team, we are doing what we can and remain dedicated to providing a reliable platform for all your websites. Thank you all for your patience.
How to: Use Your Own Domain Name with Terapad
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Wednesday, 07 January 09 - 06:28 AM (GMT) By Ces Catubay in Terapad how-tos |
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Using your own domain name with Terapad is one advantage you can get even with a free website. Having a domain increases professionalism of your website and can improve your search rankings in search engines and gain additional traffic.
In order to use your own domain, you need to follow the instructions accurately. Read carefully below.
First, please understand you'll be making changes to your domain name at your own risk. If you are not comfortable with domain names modifications, we recommend you abstain from making these changes. In fact, should something go wrong, we'll be unable to help.
Terapad is an application platform. We do not provide Domain Name registration, DNS or redirection services, your registrar does. If you don’t already have a domain name we recommend either Godaddy or Enom. Both of these registrars provide good value domain name registration and provide free DNS services. Some domain name registrars will offer you domain name registration but will not provide you with a DNS service. In this case we recommend transferring your domain name to a domain name registrar that does provide a free DNS service (like Godaddyor Enom) or alternatively sign up for a DNS service from a third party like Gradwell or DyNDNS. If you require email to use with your own domain name we recommend Google Mail which, like Terapad, is also free of charge.
Please carefully follow the instructions below in order to set up your own domain. There are two options. We cannot provide assistance in these areas and if you require additional help we suggest you contact a Terapad Reseller in your area that provides Domain Name Registration advice.
Different Domain Name Registrars will have different screen layouts and options, but the underlying theory is the same. We have provided examples using some major Domain Name Registrars, for further assistance making these changes you should contact your Domain Name Registrar or a Terapad reseller.
OPTION 1 - Change Your Host A record
This is the recommended method of using your own domain name with Terapad. It is slightly more complex than Option 2, but does result in a more professional set up recognised my Search Engines and Statistics Packages.
The IP address of your website is currently 84.45.46.82. Terapad does not guarantee that this IP address will stay the same forever. However we intend to do whatever we can to keep it. If our IP address changes for any reason we will provide all Terapad users with as much notification as humanely possible. The notification will appear in your today page. You will need to manually change your host A record if we change IP address.
NB: Terapad will only work for one HOST A record at a time. Therefore if you wanted two websites called http://www.mydomain.com and http://server.mydomain.com you will need to have two Terapad sites.
When you have made the change you must complete the form below and let us know the name of your custom domain, so we can make the final changes on our end and activate your new site address within our system.
We'll update your site address to http://www.mydomain.com/. This will fully replace your old http://mydomain.terapad.com address, which will cease to function. Your control panel will therefore be located at http://www.mydomain.com/cpanel after we made the modifications.
Let's use GoDaddy as an example.
Example of Option 1 – change your HOST (A) Record with GoDaddy
In your "Domain Manager" ensure that DNS Servers are currently set to Go Daddy’s "Default Parked NameServers" . They should look like this:
To change them simply click on one of the name servers and change to "Default Parked NameServers"
Under the "Total DNS" setting in Domain Manager click on the link that says "Total DNS Control and MX records"
First make sure there is no CNAME (Alias) record for "www" ... if there is then delete it by clicking the black cross on the right of the record:
Then on the panel which is labelled "A (Host)", select "Add New Record" . Add a record for ‘www’ and click OK:
The end result will look like this:
Now you must contact Terapad using our dedicated form.
The form is for those who have created a HOST (A) Record in their domain name's DNS and pointed it to Terapad's IP address (currently 84.45.46.82).
When you have submitted the form the following will happen:
a) Our technical staff will check that www.yourdomainname.com is pointed at our IP address.
b) Your Terapad domain name will be changed.
NB: You need to log in to your control panel to located the form.
OPTION 2 - Use a Redirect.
This is not the recommended way of using your own domain name with Terapad. It is not good for your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and it also stops statistics packages such as Google Analytics from working properly. However if this does not bother you then this is an easy way to get your own domain name working, and does not involve having to contact Terapad.
Domain Name Registrars call their redirect service by different names. You may here it referred to as a 301 or 302 Redirect, an http redirect, a URL forward, or a ghosted or masked redirect. Essentially these are all the same service.
Example of Option 2 – Use a Redirect with GoDaddy
In your "Domain Manager" ensure that DNS Servers are currently set to Go Daddy’s "Default Parked NameServers" . They should look like this:
To change them simply click on one of the name servers and change to "Default Parked NameServers"
On the main Domain Manager Page you will see " Forwarding" and the link that says "Domain is not forwarded" – click on this:
Add in the name of your Terapad site. Using a 301 type redirect will help with Search Engines, but if you are concerned about Search Engine Optimisation we still recommend you use Option 1. In this example we are redirecting to http://mydomain.terapad.com. When ready click OK.
Godaddy will prompt you to let you know that this will take a few minutes to set up, click OK again to acknowledge this and you are done.
If you have followed the instructions carefully, your domain name will be activated within hours. Double check your work before sending a domain change request.
Merry Christmas from Terapad
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Thursday, 25 December 08 - 07:00 AM (GMT) By Ces Catubay in Terapad News |
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8 Fresh Designs for your Terapad Website
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Thursday, 11 December 08 - 09:07 AM (GMT) By Ces Catubay in Terapad News |
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Notice some new designs on the template library? Yes, you’ve seen it right; a new set of templates has arrived.
Few months ago, the request a template feature started to hit the road and an overwhelming number of requests filled our inbox. We love to hear your great ideas; and we have to read every detail of your suggestions. Surely, the screening process took a while but it’s worth it. We love to make things that people love so it’s important that they will be useful for the majority of the Terapad users.
You’ve spoken - we listened. Today we present to you eight high-quality templates, each uniquely designed to suite your needs – and again, absolutely free!
Please observe that the list of templates come in alphabetical order.
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1. Home Decors Home sweet home! Everybody knows the feeling of comfort when you’re home. On this template, we bring you that comfy feeling we all love. Interior designers can use this on giving tips on home decorations and designing dilemmas. It can also be used to sell your home make-over services and retailing home decoration supplies online. |
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2. Real Estate Our Real Estate template is ideal for real estate agents or anyone who’s on the same field. Since Terapad is very easy to use and bundled with web 2.0 technology, third party apps such as your home search provider can be embedded easily. With its clean and professional look, you can assure your customers that they came to the right place. |
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3. Sea Scouts Terapad campaigns for Scouts worldwide. That includes Sea Scouts, members of the worldwide scouting movement with its activities mainly on water. Just like the free scouts templates, Sea Scout troops can use this free template to organize events, sell scout related merchandize, accept donations, publish latest news, upload pictures using the photo gallery and discuss anything with their members through forums. |
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4. Snowboarding Love snowboarding? Then this template is for you. The snowboarding template is designed for folks who simply want to feel the chill on gliding icy slopes. This template is great for snowboarding clubs who want to discuss, make friends and share common interests with their fellow members. Got snowboarding products? Use this design to sell merchandize to avid snowboarders. |
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5. Sound Waves The sound waves template was designed for individuals and groups who love the beats of sounds. The design is custom tailored specially for sound enthusiasts. Use this design on your website to send leads, book events, showcase your disc jockey talents and song remixes, set appointments on parties or sell merchandize. |
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6. Sportbike Adventure People who tour on motorcycles, twisty roads and castles, scenery race tracks can now take advantage of the new sport bike adventure template. Just like the other templates, different clubs can use this to discuss their latest tours, share thoughts, ask questions to fellow members for some tips, and trade in some sport biking goods. Be updated and never miss any event on your league. |
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7. The Sweet Shop Want a website to sell your homemade pastries? Piece of cake! The sweet shop template is specially designed for people who love the world of sweets. If you’re an expert in baking, start an e-shop for your delicious cakes, colourful cupcakes, and yummy cookies with Terapad. You can always start with a free website option. |
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8. Youth Group Youth group websites are important specially to get everyone’s eyes for different activities you have on schedule. Your organization can also raise funds and receive donations for your charitable events by integrating widgets on your website. Use this template and invite new members on your group. |
The design of your website plays an important role on your visitors’ impressions. Give an impact on your viewers by using these lovely designs. A good design bundled with quality content will make a successful result. We’ll be delighted to see how these templates can help you.
Christmas Templates for your Terapad Website
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Tuesday, 02 December 08 - 06:51 AM (GMT) By Ces Catubay in Terapad News |
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Twinkling Christmas lights, sound of carols, cheerful decorations, and bells jingling surrounds the neighborhoods once again. Everybody knows it's Christmas once more!
Regardless of different beliefs and traditions, it remains as one of the most celebrated holidays of the year. People all over the world are busy giving presents and cooking their favorite dishes for their loved ones. Christmas is a time for families – just being with them and having fun!
In the mood for the celebration of Christmas, Terapad has given out presents for you - two new Christmas templates! These templates are named “White Christmas” and “Merry Christmas”, again available for you to use in the template library. You can switch your website’s design by simply resetting the css codes on your control panel.
The Christmas templates help you bring a joyous and festive mood for your visitors. If you are having a Christmas sale on your online store, then these templates can be a perfect way of bringing the holiday feel on your website.
These designs are good to go for anyone who wishes to embrace the spirit of the yuletide season.
New Set of Free Scout Website Templates - Out Now!
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Friday, 21 November 08 - 09:02 AM (GMT) By Ces Catubay in Terapad News |
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Terapad with its commitment to its public to deliver free quality websites has released six fresh designs for the scouts of the world. Similar to the first release of scouting websites, these designs are dedicated to support millions of scouts all over the world to get online. Included in the release of websites for scouts are Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Ireland and Korea. Each template is uniquely designed that appeals to them individually.
 Scouts Australia |
 Scouts Canada |
 Scouts Indonesia |
Scouts India |
 Scouts Ireland |
 Scouts Korea |
Getting a website for your troop is a smart move to organize and interact with your members. Good news is, you can afford one without spending a single centavo – it’s absolutely free!
So what can you do with your free website? Here are few things of what’s in store for you.
Schedule Events – Setting up an event for your troop is now made easier with the built in feature from Terapad.
Exchange Ideas – Plan your next agenda using forums. Brainstorm on how you can raise funds for your troops and get help.
Publish News – Tell the world about the success of the latest charity event you’ve hosted by blogging using the news feature. Terapad has built in news aggregators that automatically pings rss readers for better rankings on search engines.
Photo Gallery – Remember how you had so much fun on your campfires? Keep the memories alive by uploading pictures on the gallery.
Scout Shop – Sell scouts merchandize using the built-in shop module. With Terapad, setting an online shop is made easy.
Contact Form – Let visitors contact you directly without publishing your email address. It’s safe and spam free!
Hire Volunteers – In need of a scout volunteer, members or administrator? The careers feature can help you announce your latest job advertisements easily.
Write about your troop - You can communicate with your visitors by writing about your history, scouts songs, resources, mission and vision, and all the fancy stuffs you can find on other scouting websites. The WYSIWYG editor allows you to enter information without worrying about css codes - just like you’re using a word processor.
Signing up is as easy as 1-2-3! Visit our signup page and build a free website today. It only takes 2 minutes to signup.
You can also refer to our resellers for scouts that offer 10% discount if you want to upgrade.
Scouts Website – Offers 10% Discount to Scouts
Beavers Website - Offers 10% Discount to Beavers
Cubs Website - Offers 10% Discount to Cubs
Guides Website - Offers 10% Discount to GirlGuides
GirlScout Websites - Offers 10% Discount to GirlScouts
Good luck on your new website for scouts!
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