I hate to focus on yet another Google product when there are so many great, free services out there to profile. But I really would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the platform I use to run this page. Google Page Creator is an easy way to make your own Web site if you don’t have any technical knowledge. It’s automatic, intuitive, and self-hosted.
Page Creator is still in beta testing, like just about everything else Google makes. You can sign up by going to the Google Pages subdomain and entering your email address in the waiting list. I waited several weeks earlier this year to get an invite, but it could be faster now. [Update: If you have a Google account, it's instantaneous.] When I first started playing with the service, it was extremely buggy. I could hardly do anything without some formatting error, and I frequently couldn’t access the page. It was fairly obvious that they were actively working on the service when I was trying to access it sometimes. This seemed more characteristic of alpha testing to me. But it soon got most of the wrinkles ironed out and now it’s pretty stable. It works with Explorer and Firefox.
I’ve been relatively impressed with how accessible Page Creator makes Web publishing. It is really easy; no knowledge of HTML or Java required. Google and other companies have brought Web publishing to the masses with blog hosting services like Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, and (dare I mention it) MySpace. But Page Creator is geared more towards actual Web pages that you can make. Want to show some photos to family members? Want to make a Web site dedicated to your favorite hobby? Make a page. It’s that easy.
Page Creator works well because it does most things for you. It has you designate a home page and structures all the other pages under it. There are over 40 templates to chose from, and while they aren’t really cutting-edge or eye-catching, they are very serviceable. The one I use, by the way, is the most boring one by far. You can alter the format of each page to have one to three columns. Page Creator gives you 100 MB of Web space to host images and files associated with your Web site, and it makes linking to files and posting images very easy.
I think Google Page Creator is great for beginners. You can do almost everything the technical way if you want — Page Creator lets you edit your pages’ HTML. But you might as well build your site your own way if you know HTML. I occasionally get impatient with the limited choices, but the whole point of Page Creator is to make it easy. And it does just that.
