| Google Pages launches |
Mar. 22, 2006
Google released the first public beta of its Google Pages service Wednesday, allowing users who signed up for the service in January and February to begin creating personal websites using an easy-to-use, browser-based tool. The service gives each user 100 MB of free storage space on Google's servers.
To use the Google "Page Creator" tool, users must have an existing Google account. However, only those who signed up early (in January and February) to use Google Pages have access to the current beta. No new signups are being accepted at this time, Google said. The company is expected to open Page Creator to more widespread use over the next few weeks.
Page Creator screenshot
(Click to enlarge)
The application has a simple interface that automatically inserts the user's Google username as the headline on the home page ("Username's Home Page"). Below that are a pair of boxes for inserting a subtitle and text, plus a third box for inserting optional "footer" information.
Buttons across the top of the work page provide the functions of "Back to Page Manager," "publish," "preview," "save," "redo," "undo," "change look," and "change layout." Controls along the left side provide functions for inserting an image, inserting a weblink, fonts, paragraphs, headings, subheading, "minor" headings, and editing the Web page html itself.
An early tryout showed that graphics and text were easily inserted and that the page "saved" quickly and accurately. A complete page with a few graphics on it could be published to the Web within a minute, using a broadband Internet service provider.
As of 11 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday, over six thousand early subscribers had joined the Google Page Creator Update email group, with about 200 joining every hour -- an indicator of roughly how many people are already using the new service.
The Google Page Creator home page is located here. Google Page Creator is a Google Labs project, and will be in a testing phase for several months, Google said.
Google is looking for feedback from users; you can enter your own comments here. Some of the early issues from users, according to Google, include non-working scroll bars and problems editing HTML.
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