Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Pages Launches

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the the-google-wide-web dept.

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."

3 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. I was one of the lucky few by PIPBoy3000 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
    1. Re:I was one of the lucky few by pete-classic · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

  2. Initial impressions by simon_hibbs2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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