nataliejost - Google Pages?

Evaluation

This is very interesting. I had no idea this was here. The interface is pleasant and very easy for a novice to use. Rivals AOL and Yahoo (Geocities) home pages but is it fully customizeable (HTML)? It looks like it but we'll see.

What Google Pages can and can not do

GP is not a blog

If you're looking for a free blog from Google, your best bet is Blogger. A blog is a webpage like this one but updates automatically. You enter your text in a "post entry" and it updates it to the front page automatically, sort of like a "news" section of a standards website.

Formatting your text

You have a few formatting options to choose from. There are the 4 preset styles for 3 headings and your normal paragraphs. These are great because they'll automatically match your template without any work from you to pick fonts, sizes, colors, etc.

But... there are those options for bold, italic, bullet lists, fonts, sizes, colors, and then your alignment - center, left, right. They don't have a justify option, but here's a tip: Go ahead and align your text (left, right or center) and then go to HTML and find where it says p style="text-align: and change it to "justify".

Creating Links

You can insert links very easily. There's even a link checker you can click to make sure you typed the URL correctly (very good for folks less familiar with all this webpage creating stuff).

Do you have a picture?

You can even upload an image, though at the moment I'm not sure what the storage space limit is on those. Actually, I tried uploading just now and it failed. I was able to link directly to the image's URL but there are no formatting options for images, so I had to edit the HTML and give it an inline style (sorry, I'm probably way over your head now if you're a basic user) to give it the floating and border action you see here. Images might be a problem for you here unless you know something about styles.

Here's something basic you can do for that. Inside the HTML find the <img> tag and put this text between img and src like this...

<img style="float:left; border: 1px solid #000;" src="IMAGEURL" />

Beyond images and text you have a lot of really decent templates to choose from. The one I chose was the best one I liked, but there are some others that aren't bad either. Here's a snapshot of a few of them. Templates are getting better these days with the advent of CSS. If you are a web designer and you're not using CSS, do the web a favor and check it out.

Some HTML

You can only edit the HTML within the section that you're editing, but for most novices that's plenty of room to break a site. You cannot get in there and change any of the base HTML or do any CSS styling to the site as a whole, but you can style sections. Within a section, place some STYLE code and use CSS to style that section.

If you know CSS pretty well, there's a lot you can do. Just remember, you can only style a section at a time and your style will apply to the whole section. You can use ID's or classes to specify certain areas to style.

What's that? Spam you say?

The downside to Google Pages is that anyone who sees your webpage also has your email address because every googlepage website uses the gmail address as the URL. So... mine being nataliejost.googlepages.com means that my email address is nataliejost@gmail.com. You might wonder then, why I gave it out just now. If you use gmail for your email, you're less likely to suffer from spamitis. Google has a really great spam blocking system that VERY ACCURATELY keeps track of what is spam and what isn't. I have freely given out this address for about a year now and though I do get 100+ spams a day, I only actually see about 1 a week actually make it into my inbox. Just be aware that your email address will be published within your webpage url.

Conclusion

Google Pages could be used for a simple website to share information that is "static" as in doesn't change. A friend of mine asked me awhile back what I charge to do a simple site and I recommended another avenue for what she wanted. It was just a ballet company's information about an upcoming event. Since it was temporary and relatively simple I suggested she save her money and go with a free service.

I recommended Backpack for that because you can easily compile information onto a webpage there, but they only have one style, so if you want more style options and you don't mind your name as the URL, Google Pages is a simple, easy-to-use site builder.

It's not ideal for anyone with real web design aspirations, but for my grandmother? Maybe. It's not bad really (no ads at this time). If you have a gmail account you can have a Google Page!