Google Pages Launches

An anonymous reader writes "Google released the first public beta of its Google Pages service Wednesday, allowing users who signed up for the service in January and February to begin creating personal websites using an easy-to-use, browser-based tool. The service gives each user 100 MB of free storage space on Google's servers. To use the Google Page Creator tool, users must have an existing Google account. However, only those who signed up early (in January and February) to use Google Pages have access to the current beta. No new signups are being accepted at this time, Google said. The company is expected to open Page Creator to more widespread use over the next few weeks."

Pages does not support Safari

[mytec]

Sorry, your web browser is not yet supported. Our programming wizards tried their darndest to get Google Page Creator to work with as many browsers as possible. But alas, even the most expert practitioners of web sorcery must sleep now and again, lest their JavaScript magic run dry. So, for now, you'll need either to download a new version of Firefox or download a new version of Internet Explorer (Windows only), and then come right back.

I was one of the lucky few

[PIPBoy3000]

I managed to sign up very early, so I got to play with it a fair bit. Since I'm a web developer, I was most interested in the technology rather than having yet another web site I maintain. Here's the things they did well, in my opinion:

• The use of AJAX is well done. Pages save by themselves, you can drag and align images, and there's a nifty file upload utility.
• There's simple versioning, allowing work on pages before publishing.
• The HTML editor is super-easy. They do let you play with the raw HTML, which might cause problems down the road.

In general, I think it'll be a nice tool for people wanting a small little web site with a handful of pages. It doesn't do other things very well, such as maintaining navigation between pages or doing any sort of interactive pages. Still, Google tries hard to capture the 80% useage and I think they've done so with this little application.

Erm, I already had access...

[ricepudd]

I'm a little confused. I signed up to GooglePages in February when Slashdot first reported this story [slashdot.org], and I've been happily been able to log in and edit my site ever since... I take it from this article that this hasn't been the case for everyone?

Initial impressions

[simon_hibbs2]

GooglePages offers a very basic set of editing tools and a bunch of pre-defined page templates. It's pretty similar in usability to the GeoCities tools I used a while back, but the big difference is that it's all in-browser editing. With GeoCities I had to download an editor app and fire it up if I wanted to work on my pages, whereas with GooglePages you can immediately start entering content which makes it much more user friendly. I almost gave up of GeoCities several times due to the initial configuration process.

I wish Google had better integration, or even just basic links between it's services. Logged into Gmail and want to edit your GooglePages? Tough, you might as well open a seperate browser tab and navigate there from scratch. Likewise if you have a personalised Google home page - you can load a widget into it linking to your gmail, but again if you're in Gmail there's no easy way to go to your Google homepage reliably.

I know these are 'beta' services and they're beign incrementaly improved - the chat client in Gmail is nice - but Gmail has been in beta for a year or so now and how difficult would it be to just put simple links in place?

Simon

Re:I was one of the lucky few

[pete-classic]

On the down side, they claim XHTML 1.0 Strict, but the pages they produce aren't even well-formed. (Notably, they don't close br, hr, and img tags.)

They also use divs where they should be using spans (if they must use these generic tags). And they leave out some required attributes.

Overall, it's a pretty sloppy job.

-Peter

Re:DeJaVoogle

[jbarr]

The really nice thing about Page Creator is that it provides simple Web pages without the annoyance of ads and "ad gadgets" that so many others include. Page Creator Web pages, so far, are clean, and easy to make. If Google eventually does include ads, you can bet that it'll be unobtrusive like most of its other services.

Google doesn't always come out with "new" products, but it often implements them in new and fresh ways.

-Jim
http://gmailtips.com/ [gmailtips.com]
http://googlepagestips.com/ [googlepagestips.com]
http://pagecreatortips.com/ [pagecreatortips.com]

Re:Dupe

[sarabob]

yes, but no matter how much TFA says it was released on Wednesday, it's been around since the last article. I built a site, other people built sites. This is nothing new, just TFA being slow.

Re:Advertising?

[mancontr]

I use it, and don't see any ad.
About the bandwidth limit, I dunno, haven't reached it..

Re:I was one of the lucky few

[mancontr]

It removes page breaks, create better HTML than MS Word but far from perfect, and you can upload any filetype.

That's strange...

[Zaatxe]

However, only those who signed up early (in January and February) to use Google Pages have access to the current beta.

I signed up to it less than a week ago and 15 minutes ago I got an e-mail saying I could already use it. And it's true, I can.

Re:I was one of the lucky few

[TOWebstress]

I've also got a beta account on Google pages, and am a web designer. The HTML it creates is passable, but not good. It can't touch the horror that MS Word creates (but what could?), but it still uses tags, which I find a bit odd. You can manipulate the raw code, but it's not set up in a way that would encourage the average user to do so. Overall, I found it a comparable product to the other basic WYSIWYG web building tools that have been online for years...a cleaner interface (a la Google, they do that well), but really nothing new. It's easy to use though. One needn't know so much as how a site is structured in order to build a site, and linking between pages is pretty intuitive. There doesn't seem to be any way to see an overall structure of the site you're creating though. You can end up just building and adding pages from here, there any everwhere, but never having the benefit of seeing a site or file structure to keep architecture in check. That said, I suspect that most of the people who use this product will be building little site...a few pages...and don't have big demands for advanced features.

Re:I was one of the lucky few

[garaged]

no script and style tags AFAIK, its quite well protected to avoid XSS, try to do any onEvent and it will be striped.

It's a pretty neat work on that side, the XHTML issue may be another story, but I think is quite good by now, it can be better really soon.

Re:Off-site storage?

[ender-]

Will they allow to use those 100Mb to store files to be linked and served from free hosted pages in other servers?

Well thus far I have been able to upload pictures and link to them from offsite without any problems. Not sure if they will continue to allow that or not. I'm also not sure what kind of bandwidth restrictions they might place on it. I suppose I could post a largish pic to the next Fark photoshop contest and see how it does.

Google Site Information

[VeryHotTopic]

FYI, the site is http://pages.google.com/ [google.com] From the site, you will learn a few things. 1) No technical knowledge is required. You can build high-quality web pages without having to learn HTML or use complex software. 2) What you see is what you'll get. You can edit your pages right in your browser, seeing exactly how your finished product will look every step along the way. 3) You dont need to worry about hosting. Your web pages will live on your own site at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com/ [googlepages.com]