I'm finally in on Google Page Creator beta

[intelliot]

This is the email you'll be watching out for, if you've signed up for the wait list. The subject is Google Page Creator -- Sign up!

Hi there,

Thanks for your interest in Google Page Creator. We appreciate your patience, and we're excited to tell you that we enabled your account today, so you can start making pages now! To get started, head over to http://pages.google.com and sign in with your Gmail password. We haven't opened up Google Page Creator to everybody yet, so you'll see a message on our home page saying that accounts are unavailable — you can just ignore that.

Google Page Creator is an experiment on Google Labs. Google Labs is where we put projects before they're ready for prime time so that we can start getting feedback from our users. So, please, tell us what you think, what features we should add, what problems you're experiencing, or anything else that can help us make Google Page Creator a better tool for you. We're listening.

This is the only email we'll be sending you — unless you'd like to receive updates in the future.

— The Google Page Creator team

These are the features advertised on first login:

Create your own web pages, quickly and easily.
Google Page Creator is a free online tool that finally makes it easy for anyone
to create and publish useful, attractive web pages in just minutes.

Publish in seconds
With one click, the pages you create are ready
for your friends, family and the whole world
to see at http://elliot.lee.googlepages.com/

Don't worry
about saving
Google Page Creator saves your changes automatically as you type, so no more nervous breakdowns from losing all your work.

What you see is what you'll get
As you edit your page, you're seeing exactly what it will look like when other people see it. No complex tools to learn. No web designers to hire.

I always knew Google would eventually get into web hosting, but it does strike a bit of worry within me when I see them doing it so quickly - and so well. At one time, I was in the web hosting business. I'm getting out of it now

[andrew247]

I didn't know you had to wait to get an email. Whenever I sign in it tells me I can create a webpage. Last time I tried it was very slow, and the page didn't save.

[mondine]

Originally Posted by andrew247

I didn't know you had to wait to get an email. Whenever I sign in it tells me I can create a webpage. Last time I tried it was very slow, and the page didn't save.

I believe he's talking about people that were waiting to create an account with them.
Once you're 'in', it seems the number of pages that you can create are virtually unlimited. Although some of the pages I've seen that load in passing, and then disappear, seem to suggest that the current limit is 100.

[warzabidul]

I've just tried google pages and it works well. It's easy to use, easy to upload images and create content and there's already a model. It's a good wysiwyg interface that autosaves all the time.


I don't need an extra website but it's fun to play with, simply to understand it's strengths and weaknesses.

[jacobjmorris]

i got access to page creator today too! i noticed you can upload files to page creator....i'm guessing there is no FTP access?brbralso, what file extension and programs are supported? it seems very basic....i'd love to use it for my existing website, but it doesn't appear they support php, or that there is a way for me to point my DNS domain name to my account.brbrjacobbr

[pottenkulam]

it's really basic. and i really don't know what to do with it... its so vanilla, it goes right back to the eraly days of free webspace. if this were around several years back, wuold have been quite useful. i used to be on geocities, and then all those shady host and run services. finally picked up my own space, and now resell some, to cover costs.

so what could one do with google pages? i guess SEO would be the first thing that coes to mind. they dont give preference, but at least you know it's there.

[sirlaguna]

Iv'e been a member since a day after Google released it as a beta and yes it is quite basic!
Though it is easy to use if you don't know much about creating webpages I suppose

[diversityworking]

Yes I'm just in two days ago, and it's been great creating page after page in Google Pages, but I've recently read this a href="http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/02/23/big-problem-with-google-pages"link/a in another Google forum where it says it might be unsafe to use Googlepages. What do you think?

[mondine]

Yes, that raises a valid point about the name of the page exposing your Gmail address to spammers.
I'd be surprised if the always-resourceful pests hadn't already picked up on that.
It isn't a new problem; quite a few services in the past have provided webspace that was based on a user mail account (I had one with Outblaze, for example).

But yes, it seems to be something Google might have anticipated, and allowed users to add some sort of anti-spam measure to their space name.
Although their filtering is pretty good (I rarely see spam in my Inbox, although the number going directly to the Spam folder is increasing); I'd probably try to get
a Google Pages account with a secondary Gmail account, if I wanted to widely publish it.