Last night Google released it’s home brewed homepage creation service Google Pages which aims to give its users easy to use tools to create their own homepages. it lets even the most unskilled webmaster on earth create more or less nice looking pages on their own subdomain [google username].googlepages.com.

Getting your first page

Publishing a simple page is divided in 4 easy steps:

1. Select a layout
   
2. Select a design
   
   
3. Putting in some content in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) Editor, that is using only the most basic formats (for more advanced formatting and content editing one has to know HTML, and has to find the edit HTML Button).
4. Hit the publish button

Pretty straightforward process

Features

• 100 MiB of web space, certainly good enough for most personal homepages.
• Clean page editor, maybe a bit too clean, since I miss some features I’d like to have.
• Autosave feature () will do a great job, once it works stable.
• Layout is independent from the style you select.
  

Besides these more or less positive features there are also some really annoying things:

• Limited capability to edit the raw HTML. I was only able to edit the HTML content of a box in the layout and not the layout itself. Also when trying to put in a simple JavaScript it would filter it out, which is not nice at all.
• Errors while trying to save or publish the page will regularly bring up a dialog telling you that the page is being edited by someone else. How’s that possible if I’m the only one who knows that the page exists? Clearly there seems to a problem with the saving engine.
• Not enough layouts. I don’t like the way Google is limiting the layout choices of the pages, it’s a bit too MSN Spaces Style for my taste, but it would be acceptable if Google’d provided enough layouts. The ones you can choose right now are a bit too standard.
• Why do certain things behave like they do? For example pressing the link-button while selected a part of a link I’d expect that the selected part would be taken out of the link and not, like it does right now, unlink the whole link.
• Autosave is nice, but I want to save by hand too, is it so difficult to add a Save-Button?
  

Final Thoughts

Once Google Pages will be stable and include some more features (the ones the expert users will certainly ask for) it may become a real threat to Geocities and all other free hosting services. But not right now. It’s a Beta, and it’s really beta, not like GMail that was working nicely but had some minor issues, Google Pages just crumpled under the heavy load this moring and many reviews are not as good as one have expected. It may improve over time, but Google has still a long way to go.
If you’re interested in getting your own page on the internet you still have two choices do it yourself and getting it done by a professional, if you decide to do it yourself and don’t have much technical know how Google Pages may just be fine for you as it is easy to use, fast and efficient for standard pages, but as soon as you want something more you’ll be lost.

As for us Web Developer: Google Pages is a low end solution which is no real threat for well designed and well managed sites, it is a good solution for personal users but no more.