Google Page Creator Examination And Test Results

Notification

According to Google, Google Page Creator will be shut down in 2008 and all the existing GPC sites will be transitioned to Google Sites: http://groups.google.com/group/GPC-How-to/msg/1260f67111144902 Links to the test pages have been removed as this page no longer exists on Google Page Creator. This page still exists for curious people who want to know how Google Page Creator looked like and features it had.

Introduction

This document shortly describes Google Page Creator's (GPC) Site Manager and Page Editor. Then it examines some of the requirements and restrictions. It also includes a few test results with file formats (e.g. avi, bmp, doc, jpg, mp3, pdf, zip) and features like HTML (tables, text styles, frames, etc.), CSS, JavaScript, Java applets, images, and embedded objects (e.g. videos) and some instructions on how to add those features. This page is mainly intended for people who are interested in Google Page Creator, but don't have their own GPC website yet, so if you are looking for GPC tutorials, see the "Other Google Pages web sites" section.

Site Manager

When you sign in to Google Page Creator, you will see the Site Manager page where you can create a new page by clicking the "Create a new page..." link at the top of the page or you can select a page you have edited before. When you have created your page, you have a few options: you can delete or duplicate it, or you can select "Unpublish" from the selection box so no-one will be able to see it until you think it's ready to be public. If you have uploaded files to your Google Page Creator account, they will appear on the right column under the "Uploaded stuff" heading. If you want to remove an uploaded file, click the trash can icon next to the name of the uploaded file and answer "OK" to the confirmation question. The top and bottom parts of the Site Manager page contain links to resources such as to the Google Page Creator forum and help pages.

Page Editor

With the Page Editor you can for example add images, links, headings, and subheadings. You can also change the font type, size and color. If you want to add an image, you simply click the "Image" button and upload the image from your computer to Google Page Creator. If you are not happy with the current look, you can switch to another template by clicking the "Change Look" or "Change Layout" link. Templates define various aspects of the page, such as the default colors, fonts and margins for different parts of the document (for example the header, footer and main content sections). Layouts are meant to define how many columns the web page contains. At the moment (February 2007), you can select to use one, two or three columns. With the two column setting either the left or right column is wider than the other column. On many web pages people usually put links to the narrow column and the main content to the wide column. If you want to adjust your pages even more, you can create your pages with your favorite editor and then upload the files to Google Page Creator.

The first column describes the feature ("Feature"). The second ("Page Editor") and third ("Manual upload") columns compare what features you can use in the Page Editor, and what you can accomplish by creating and then uploading an HTML file. "OK" means there are no problems with the feature, "NO" means it doesn't work at all, and "SW" means the feature works somewhat but not totally as wanted. From the above table you can see that you can easily add for example many HTML, CSS, Java, and JavaScript features by simply creating your web page for example with an HTML editor (e.g. Mozilla Composer), a WYSIWYG editor (e.g. OpenOffice.org) or with a text editor (e.g. SuperEdi, Notepad, or emacs) and then you just upload the file to GPC. You can also use Google videos, Google maps and stat counters by uploading your pages. Using the Google Page Creator's Page/HTML editor you encounter some problems, because you can't edit the head section of the HTML documents. For example there are some issues with JavaScript and CSS when using the Page Editor, because you can't modify the contents inside the <head> </head> tags of the HTML file, and some JavaScript and CSS features are meant to be defined in the head section of the HTML file. For example JavaScript Test 2 only works with an uploaded file (you can see the button, because it isn't part of the JavaScript code), but there is a workaround as you can see in JavaScript Test 3 (see the source codes for more information). The idea is that the JavaScript alert box will be shown only when the button is pushed, that's why the two test documents have the <input> tag. There is a similar problem with CSS: in CSS Test 1 the style sheet is defined in the head section of the document, so it doesn't work in Page Editor. Workaround is shown in CSS Test 2 where the style information is defined inside the <p> tag using the style attribute. Frames don't work at all, because inside the main frameset document the <frameset> </frameset> tags are used instead of the <body> </body> tags. But if you upload your files, JavaScript, CSS and frames work OK. Because the Page Editor uses ready-made templates which use for example ready-made CSS, you can only somewhat add text styles (for example blockquote isn't shown correctly). Update: until around June and July 2006 adding JavaScript, music, video or other embedded objects to documents was impossible with the GPC Page/HTML Editor, because it removed HTML elements like <script>, <embed>, and <bgsound> in the HTML source. Now there is only a problem with the <bgsound> tag, which is used for automatic background music in some web browsers. The <bgsound> tag is changed into non-working text as you can see in Music Test 1 if you look at the HTML source.

Adding features to your web page using the Page Editor

You probably want to add a feature to your Google Pages page. It may be one of these: - Flash, - Google AdSense, - Google video, - Java, - JavaScript, - music, - stat counter, or - video Using the Google Page Creator's Page Editor it should be easy: first you copy the code for the feature you want to add to your web page and then you paste it to your web page. To copy the code from a web page, use a web browser and go to the web page from where you want to copy the code to your file. For example if you want to copy code from the Google Video web site, select the video you want to embed to your web page, click the "Email - Blog - Post to MySpace" button and then the "Embed HTML" link and the code should appear in a text box, and it should look something like this: <embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8618166999532839788"> </embed> Now you can copy the code. For example, if you are using Internet Explorer, select the code in the text box using the left hand mouse button, then right-click the text, and select "Copy" (see picture 5).

In Google Page Creator's Site Manager select the page you want to modify, and then in Page Editor select the section of the page you want to edit, click the "[edit html]" link and paste the code to your page (select the place where you want to copy the code, select "Edit" in your web browser and click "Paste") (see picture 6). Remember to click the "Save Changes" button and then the "Publish" button.

And that's it! You are done. If you want to know how to edit your pages with your own HTML editor, read on. It's a bit more complicated, but you can bypass some of the problems mentioned above when you use Google Page Creator's Page Editor.

Adding features to your site by uploading files

Another way to add features to your pages is to use your own HTML editor and uploading your files to Google Page Creator. That way you can have even more features compared to using only Google Page Creator's Page Editor.

Download the original file from GPC

If you have already created a page with the Page Editor, you can download that page, make the adjustments to it with your own HTML editor and then upload it back to Google Page Creator. To download your GPC web page you can use for example a web browser. If you are using Internet Explorer, go to your page, which might be for example http://YOURACCOUNT.googlepages.com/homepage Then save the page with Internet Explorer by selecting "File", "Save As". The suggested name for the file might be for example Welcome To My Home Page.html but because spaces and some special characters can cause problems, preferably use only letters (a, b, c, ...), numbers (1, 2, 3, ...), and characters like $, -, _, ., +, !, ', (, ) in the file name. So in this case the file name could be for example my_homepage.html When you save the file, make a note where you save the file so that you can easily find it later.

Open the downloaded file with an editor

Now that you have downloaded the web page, you need to edit it. Open the file with a text editor, HTML editor or WYSIWYG editor. You can use for example Notepad, Mozilla Composer, or OpenOffice.org. If you are using Notepad, select "File", "Open...", and select the file you have just downloaded to your computer.

Copy and paste the code

Next you want to copy and paste the code (Flash code, Google video code, music code, stat counter code, etc.) to your file to the correct section of your file. Usually the code should be put after <body> tag and before </body> tag, but it depends on the code. The web site offering the code should have instructions where to put the code. Use a web browser and go to the web page from where you want to copy the code to your file. See picture 5 and the text in section "Adding features to your web page using the Page Editor" where the Google Video web site is used as an example. Go back to your editor and paste the code to your file. For example, if you are using Notepad, select the place in the file where you want to copy the code, select "Edit", and click "Paste" (see picture 7).

Save the file

You need to save the file so that the changes will be made to the file. For example, if you are using Notepad, select "File", and click "Save".

Upload the file

After saving the file, sign into Google Page Creator (if you haven't already), and upload the file: click the "[upload]" link on the right side of the GPC Site Manager page, and then click the "Browse..." button that appears, and select the file you want to upload (see picture 8).

When uploading of the file has finished, the file name should appear in GPC Site Manager page under text "Uploaded stuff". If you have created a web page with an editor other than GPC's editor, you can upload it in the same manner. The problem with the uploading solution is that when you want to change your web page, you need to always download, edit and upload the file. If you keep the file in your hard drive, then you only need to edit and upload the file.

Open the uploaded file

To see the file you have uploaded and to find out the URL (web address) for the uploaded file, look at the file name list below text "Uploaded stuff" on Google Page Creator's Site Manager page (if you don't see any file names under the "Uploaded stuff" text, but next to the text you see a small black triangle pointing to right, click the triangle). Then click the name of the file you have uploaded. It should be the last name in the list (see picture 9).

A new web browser window should open and the URL for the file should be shown in the web browser's address bar (see picture 10). You can copy the URL for the uploaded file from the web browser's address bar by left-clicking the address bar and then right-clicking it and selecting "Copy" (or similar). Or you could have copied the URL from the file name list by right-clicking the link for the file and clicking "Copy Shortcut" (or similar).

Offline editing

If you want to edit an uploaded file offline, you need to have a copy of it on the computer you are using. You can edit it with an editor and the next time you are online, you can upload it. If you want to edit offline a page that can be edited with Google Page Creator's Page Editor so that the URL (web address) for that page won't change, then you will encounter problems: you can't edit that page offline just like that and then upload a file, because uploaded files have different URLs than pages that can be edited with Google Page Creator's Page Editor. You have at least three options if you really want to edit the page offline: 1) If you copy content from Google Page Creator's Page Editor to a text file using a text editor (e.g. Notepad, emacs, etc.), none of the text styles and images will be copied to the text file and links will be saved as text. And when you copy edited content back from the text editor back to your page in Google Page Creator's Page Editor, you need to make all the text styles, add images and create links again. 2) If you copy content from Google Page Creator's Page Editor to an HTML editor (e.g. Mozilla Composer), or to a WYSIWYG editor (e.g. OpenOffice.org), text styles and links might be somewhat OK, but images probably won't get copied correctly or at all. And when you copy content from the HTML editor or WYSIWYG editor back to your page in Google Page Creator's Page Editor, the text styles, links and images might look strange or they might not work at all. 3) If instead of the content you copy the HTML source from Google Page Creator's HTML view to a text editor or HTML editor, then you need to understand HTML and it's easy to mess up with HTML especially if you are new to editing HTML. After looking at the above options for editing offline a page that can be edited with Google Page Creator's Page Editor so that you don't need to change the URL for the original page, you might like this suggestion more: use an uploaded file instead (edit the file offline and upload it when you are online). In that case, as mentioned before, the uploaded file will have a different URL.

More help and instructions

It's advisable to study the basics of HTML, so you know what you are doing. Here are some links to HTML tutorials: http://www.tips-tricks.com/http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asphttp://www.awdsf.com/courseware/html/html1.htmhttp://www.htmlbyexample.com/http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Data_Formats/Markup_Languages/HTML/Tutorials/Beginners/ You can also ask for more advises from the official Google Page Creator forum: http://groups.google.com/group/GPCDiscussionGroup Sometimes even Google employees might answer some of the questions. Remember to search for previous discussions in the forum, and check the Google Page Creator FAQ and Help Center pages, as your question might have already been answered: http://pages.google.com/-/about.html#faqhttp://www.google.com/support/pages

Who is it for?

Google Pages service is probably meant for people who like to create personal pages about themselves and their hobbies. Some firms seem to have also created their own sites with Google Pages, but they might not be taken as seriously as companies who have their own web domains and their web site is created by a professional web designer. On the other hand, for example a small company might not need a professional looking web site anyway.

What about spam?

Because your Google Pages site has the same beginning as your Gmail account's beginning (as in YOURACCOUNT.googlepages.com and in YOURACCOUNT@gmail.com) spammers can easily harvest email addresses from Google Pages sites using automatic bots (as they can from other free web site services also where the site name is constructed from the email address). On the other hand, Gmail's spam filter does a fairly good job and you should use a free email address only for non-serious things other than your business or your job, because free email services can be more unpredictable and have more problems. Also, spam bots may find your email address from other sources such as from other web pages, discussion forums, and mailing lists. One way to try to avoid spam is that there should be a "Create a new site" link at the top of the Site Manager page, so you can create another site, which doesn't have the same beginning as your Gmail account.

How do I get my site indexed by Google?

To get your Google Pages site indexed by Google Web Search and because Google has limited resources, Google doesn't index all the pages on the web, so you need incoming links from other sites as they are an essential way for Google's automatic indexing algorithms to figure out which web sites are important, popular or interesting enough to get indexed by Google. You can find more info from Google's webmaster pages and from various search engine optimization (SEO) pages: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&topic=8522http://sites.google.com/site/tomihasa/google-general-faq#neverindexedhttp://www.google.com/search?&q=SEO+basics&num=100http://www.google.com/search?&q=SEO+checklist&num=100

Other Google Pages web sites

If you want to find other Google Pages web sites, you can try this Google search: http://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Agooglepages.com&num=100 There are also some pages that have listed other Google Page Creator sites by category: http://rami.mawas.googlepages.com/gpcguidehttp://www.pagecreatordirectory.googlepages.com/directory Tutorials, tips, tricks, FAQs and other info about Google Page Creator: http://paul.maunders.googlepages.com/http://martin.blow.googlepages.com/technical2http://jvanbaelen.googlepages.com/gpcinfohttp://nataliejost.googlepages.com/http://gpxfiles.googlepages.com/http://gpcfaq.googlepages.com/http://jvanbaelen.googlepages.com/gpctips&faq

Advise on security

As with any web pages, beware of viruses. Also Google Page Creator pages have been reported having viruses: http://groups.google.com/group/google.public.support.general/msg/4374817fa8d19a61 So always when you surf on the web, remember to use an up-to-date operating system, web browser, virus scanner, spyware remover and a firewall. Avoid clicking suspicious links and downloading files, especially executable files (usually .exe or .com files) from sites you don't much know about. You could even disable JavaScript, ActiveX and some other functionalities in your web browser for sites you don't trust: http://sites.google.com/site/tomihasa/google-general-faq#saferbrowsersettings

Last modified: August 5th, 2008

Author: Tomi Häsä (tomi.hasa@gmail.com)

URL: http://sites.google.com/site/tomihasa/google-page-creator

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