Google Page Creator Review

For easy development of my new project I have chosen the Google Page Creator and here is a review.

Signing in is easy if you already have a gmail account, just use it and you are away. You will be automatically get your first site as yourusername.googlepages.com. First thing to notice is that you get to have three sites in total (at the time of writing this), instead of five as written in description. This is probably because people were grabbing subdomain names like crazy. If you read about this trick when picking subdomain names you should not have problems.

This online page builder follows usual Google philosophy to keep everything as simple as possible. You start by picking up a theme and layout. This is the first problem as the design of the site will be somewhat limited because themes can not be altered.

You can then add pages to your site and easily interlink them together (when making a link you can choose between external or your page from a list).

Adding page elements like images is easy, as it is aligning their position. You can also edit html directly and add javascript, flash or any other objects. This also means that adding adsense will be easy as copying the code into html where you want it. There is also a number of predefined gadgets to use, like weather forecasts, news, games etc. but many of them come with some kind of advertisements so their usability is questionable.

Now comes the bad part. You have absolutely no control about website settings. If you wondered how to delete a website with google page creator (it would not be a problem if you didn't have a limit of three) then wonder no more, as you can't! If you accidentally delete the home page you can not undelete it or create it again! If you copy the page because you have a similar one, the name of the page will not be possible to edit and it will just get a suffix '2'. The name of any page is not possible to edit at all, and they get names by the title you assign them to them at creation. The user also has no control about displaying and formatting the site title.

On the bright side, the tool is relatively easy to use and you have total 100 MB allowed space to upload your files. Also sites built this way should be indexed by google very fast without you doing anything. That is the reason I am not posting a link to them at this time as I want to measure how much time will pass before they appear in the index.

I expect that google will soon update the page creator with some new features so stay tuned!