Friday, February 24, 2006 9:32 AM
Google has (out of the blue as far as I can tell) decided to take on the free web hosting services. So cool! Their new feature, Google Pages (pages.google.com) lets you author online or upload your own pages. It works very well as much as I've played with it so far. Just a couple of buttons for WYSIWYG, or a button to switch to HTML view. It's a very templated approach with their browser-based tool, but they are nice templates, and probably fine for most people. The editing is intuitive and powerful enough. Adding a link brings up a dialog. You can link to one of your existing Google pages, upload a file, link to an external URL, or enter an email address. It works very nicely.
No support for most styles or tables, but again, the average person trying to make an online presence (rather than a totally custom-designed site) would appreciate this simplicity. For those with better design skills, just use the upload features. It seems like a very good compromise. I don't like that you only get 100MB for your site. It would be nice to tap into your Gmail excess storage...
All in all, a great start. Of course it's in beta. Next they need to add calendaring features (calendar.google.com is already reserved...), integrate it for events on your site, and create a new blog-lite platform. Blogger's fine I guess, but I'd more like a platform where I can create any site and plug in blog content as a panel that can fit in any design. Calendar events and photo albums (Picasa integration anybody...) could be other panels. RSS feeds would be automatically supported with content, event, and maybe even photo/album categories. Sounds like a sweet platform to me anyway!