Google Page Creator

February 23rd, 2006

Quite a few people have been talking about the launch of Google’s Page Creator service. This is a bit like a Geocities Google version. The WYSIWYG editor is quite cool and seems to produce fairly good HTML. The pages are hosted on the googlepages.com domain without any adverts so it’s a great way to get started with your own website without the complexities of HTML and the advert-ridden junk of Geocities or Tripod.

You get 100MB of storage space for pages and images. Oddly enough, Google seems to allows adult content (there is a checkbox on the Site Settings page)

It feels like a bit of an outgrowth of Blogger to me. It has auto-save functionality and theme selection, similarly to Blogger.

Google Pages might be a nice place to host files which can be referenced from forum posts (or even hotlinked if Google allows it; not read the Terms of Use).

I do believe there may be a related spam problem with Google Pages. To use Google Pages you need a Gmail username and your webpage will be at yourusername.googlepages.com. It can be quite easy for spammers to harvest lots of valid e-mail addresses by searching for site:googlepages.com.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Blogger and Page Creator eventually merge into one service as they are quite similar. Perhaps Google will even decide to turn this into a full web hosting service with FTP, PHP, etc.

Since there are reviews and screenshots on the blog of every man and his dog, I won’t provide screenshots or a detailed review - Google Blogoscoped has some screenshots and a nice review.