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Well, I got an invite to check out Google Page Creator today. The good news is I doubt this will threaten my career; the bad news is… actually, there isn’t really any bad news (except perhaps some of the tacky templates available, but to be fair, they look pretty slick compared to the good old days of Geocities).

My main interest in this was the HTML output. I created a quick page (boy what a beauty it is!) and checked the source; structurally, it’s using using XHTML with CSS layout which is great (even if the CSS contains lots of hacks). However, Google’s reputation for bad HTML doesn’t seem to be quite ready to change, as within the nice XHTML layouts there are a few <font> tags and some simple unescaped inline elements, such as <br>s <hr>s.

The WYSIWYG-style interface is of the usual high standard you’d expect from Google — AJAX rich and very easy to use. There are warnings about putting your email online (“Be careful. Remember that any time you include an email address on a web page, nasty spammers can find it too”) are nice — as are the encouragements to check links before you put them in.

I’m looking at these features from the point of view of what Google perceives its target customers to be: basic users who are making their first steps into web publishing. This may include those who may not know what a blog is, yet or how to share photos online, or those who just want to set up a good old fashioned ‘homepage’. However, with the boom in community-centric online services (Blogger, Myspace, Flickr) I’m really not seeing how this service is going to really impact in any serious way — unless Google has something else up its sleeves for this one.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 7:12 am and is filed under Web Design + Development, Web - General, Blogs, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.