Today Google has officially closed the new sign-ups for Google Page Creator. They say that, they have shifted their focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.
If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year. More information about the transition will be posted as we get closer to the transition time.
And thanks to Google, for allowing us to use Google Sites to create websites. You can use Google Sites to create websites, wikis, intranets, projects sites, club sites, and more. See http://sites.google.com. You can signup for Google Site Creator at any time.
Anyway, Googlepages did not have many features, which is the main reason why it was not a buzz like blogspot or wordpress. So its a welcome sign to see some thing more creative, which has more features and under our(users) control.
But I am worried about one thing, that is the URL structure. Previously it was http://sitename.googlepages.com. What will happen after the transition? Because in Google site creator the URL structure is http://sites.google.com/site/site-name-choosen/ .
As many people have a googlepages account and they simply upload things to their googlepages account and link it to thier blog, to save bandwidth. If the URL structure changes means, all those links has to be searched and modified manually, which is a tedious job. Anyway, lets hope for the best and what we can do now is, to wait and see what Google thinks about this!
I think they want to shut this service in future.
This part maybe never get benefit for GG. 🙂
I never used this part before too.
I don’t like this at all. Now I have to tell about my new URLs in all the website and forum profiles I’m using (unfortunately I was expecting GPC to graduate from Google Labs). I also need to tell search engines my new URLs in case I want to move from Google Page Creator to some other site than Google Sites (for example Yahoo! GeoCities allows uploading HTML files). I’m used to creating geeky old school pages (optimized for any web browser and any operating system and making the size of the documents as small as possible still including all the important information on the pages) with little unnecessary content that is created by Web 2.0 technology used by Google Page Creator Page Manager and Google Sites.
With Google Page Creator you could upload HTML files and that’s why with GPC it was much easier to make your pages look exactly the way you wanted with uploaded HTML files and CSS files (or CSS in HTML). With Google Sites you can’t upload HTML files or use scripting either.
When I tried moving my Google Page Creator pages to Google Sites, I had to copy and paste the HTML source from the HTML files and change and tweak the HTML and it still looks disgusting. Also, my week old Google Sites website got banned, because its spam filter sucks so I had to contact the Google Sites team to get my Google Sites website back. Now my pages are back to Google Page Creator and I’m not sure what I should do. Google Sites is definitely Beta and should be told on every page on that service.
@Tomi Häsä, I visited your website and its very much informative. I had read about using some of the features of GPC in your website when I created mine….So sad to see Google forcing us to move from Google Page Creator to Google Sites. Hope its all over and I need to say goodbye to my old site, as it would be almost impossible to move all my html pages and my Search Engine traffic to Google Sites.