Google's Page Creator, the newest addition to Google's services has been a big topic lately. It is (as of now) still accessible to create new pages on and off, but there have been many newly created Google Page sites.
Page Creator has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get; pronounced whiz-ee-wig) editor as well as the ability to edit in HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language). Google also dedicates 100mb of server space to each website, meaning that under one account you can create multiple pages and upload up to 100mb worth of content. There is also a maximum of up to 100 pages. "Change look" gives you a thumbnail view of 41 different templates to choose from, all of which look great. From "change layout" you can choose from four layouts of header and content, header, sidebar (left or right) and content, or header and three columns. Both images and links are easily added from the sidebar, as well as formatting options such as bold and italics. You do not receive your own domain, but a subdomain based on your account name. Some problems so far have been that the "edit html" link will disappear from the page with certain headers and you can't scroll down.
Other than that the only bad parts of Google's Page Creator is its small variety of templates (most are just different colors), and lack of ability to edit or create templates. Also unlike Blogger (also a Google service) that is for bloggers, Google Page Creator doesn't have an RSS feed. A hidden functionality is under "settings" in the "Page Manager" you can change your page's title, but lacks any other noteworthy settings. At first I thought 100mb was a lot of filespace for a website, until I realized that over 2500mb is dedicated to email for each Gmail account. I would like to see all this space pooled together so that the site can use all of the over 2600mb. Google "Analytics" should be included in the Page Manager to let website owners "view their new Google Pages traffic statistics", instead Google Analytics is available separate and by invitation only. Finally (and this one's the worst) Page Creator only supports Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Apparently Safari can be used by going through the debug menu, but Opera and Flock likely aren't supported. Whether you can still view a Page Creator site is currently unknown (so post in the comments), but right now it is making a page that is the problem.
Good
- WYSIWYG and HTML editor
- Nice looking templates
- different layouts
- can create many pages
- Few templates
- No template editing ability
- No template creating ability
- Still buggy
- No RSS
- No hit counter or analytics
- Lack of browser support
- Only a reasonable amount of filespace
You may notice some of the uploaded content will temporarily go offline and since the images in this article are uploaded to Google Pages, you can tell yourself how flaky their service still is as the images don't always appear. Hopefully Google will work this out soon, otherwise it is back to flickr for me.
What I did not originally consider is that with the given 100mb, you do not need to use Google's templates. To do this, all you need to do is upload your website's .html/.htm/.css files and they will function with the url given. You can even redirect traffic from the /home page used as default to this new page.
With this free 100mb of internet space, consider it an alternative method of transferring large files from computer to computer.
A problem Google had since about February 28, is the maximum of 100 pages is automatically exceeded for (apparently) all Page Creator sites, even though no pages are shown. Not even user created pages are shown. This also means you can neither delete, add or change content because almost all links are disabled. Note that in the picture, none of the filespace was even used yet, add that this problem also occurs with content filled sites.
