Google Page Creator is a website creation and hosting service by Google. It is a useful tool for basic website design, requiring no HTML knowledge. During development, it was codenamed Trogdor, a reference to the popular Homestar Runner website.
Features
The features of Google Page Creator include:
- 100 Megabytes of file and page storage (Note: There is a 10MB limit on file uploads, and no more than 500 files can be uploaded at a time)
- 41 web templates, which can be applied to individual pages
- 4 page layouts
- Limited HTML, CSS and JavaScript editing
- Autosave - edits are automatically saved at regular intervals
- Unique subdomain for each user's site, such as http://username.googlepages.com
- Three (3) unique subdomains are able to be registered per new user (changed from 4 to 3 subdomains in 2006)
- No advertisements of any kind
Storage space
Although Google Page Creator offers 100 megabytes of storage, the bandwidth limit is unknown.
Files that are hosted can be linked to from any other site. Storage in Page Creator can also be utilized to upload pages to any account, without using the Web interface to create the page.
Experimental features
Google has added many "experimental features" to Page Creator since its release, including the ability to add widgets, crop images, and resize images to any size (other than the original four preset sizes). Originally these features had to be activated by users, but now they come automatically with every site.
Criticisms
Perhaps to address this vulnerability to spammers, Google allows the user to 'Create another site', which would be a new address within the googlepages.com domain. To avoid spammers, one can create a new site and hide the default site, which contains one's email address.
Lacking the ability to link to external CSS means in-page CSS has to be utilized, and such style code cannot change the basic structure of the templates. Some critics have claimed that the templates and limited customization will lead to similar problems (such as large numbers of sites with uninteresting, 'identikit' designs) as were experienced by the GeoCities service in the late 1990s.[1] An earlier criticism that Google's own Adsense program and similar services are not available in the Page Creator and needed a 'hack' to work has been addressed by the ability to include JavaScript in Page Creator.
While the GUI makes good use of Ajax features, the HTML code rendered is deprecated.
Google launched a product called Google Sites in February 2008. It is unclear whether these two products lines will each remain, or whether Google Pages will get phased out.
References
- ^ Ars Technica
External links
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