Over the weekend I upgraded from TypePad Basic ($4.95/mo) to TypePad Pro ($14.95/mo.)
Why? Because I’m rolling in dough.
Actually, because I wanted to take advantage of some of the Pro features, such as getting my hands dirty under the hood, and being able to affect the layout of the pages. To be honest, maybe there’s a good DIY tutorial out there, but I’m not sure how people without a solid understanding of XHTML and CSS would be able to make changes to the underlying code of their site. I guess they could always hire flyte to design and customize their business blog for them.
Upgrading from one plan to the other is simple. After logging in, it’s a matter of navigating to Control Panel > Account Info > Upgrade/Downgrade account and clicking on the level you want. Confirm that you’re willing to pay the extra amount and presto-chango you’re at the higher level.
You immediately get more space and a bigger bandwidth allowance. I’m not sure if you get more designs, but you do get access to their advanced editor, which allows you to see and make changes to the code. This is what I used to add the image of the 7 Days to Search Engine Success e-Course and the corresponding "Buy Now" button, as well as the blog subscription box.
I did notice a slight bug, however. Both of these items required a <form> tag. When I posted the new code in–which I had tested as an XHTML page in Dreamweaver–and then saved it, everything after the closing </form> tag was gone! This happened a couple of times before I realized what had happened, and then one more time while I was testing my hypothesis. It was as if the closing </form> tag was telling TypePad that this was the end of the code in the column. Maybe it’s a Mac/Firefox thing, I don’t know.
I was able to get around this by reposting the whole bit of code after saving it and having it truncated, and for whatever reason, this worked.
(Did I just confuse you? I’ve reread those last two paragraphs 3 times and I’m still not sure.)
I was a little disappointed as I thought I might have access to the page as a whole, and it didn’t seem from my first attempts that I could. Instead, you can go in and affect the coding in separate sections of the page, i.e., sidebar1, sidebar2, Main Index template, etc. However, I could be wrong on this, and if I uncover evidence to the contrary I’ll be sure to post something on it, and hopefully link to it from this post.
Rich Brooks
TypePad Pro Blogger
