Innovative Future Web Design

As mentioned in Google Page Creator Beta I said I was going to be part of the Beta testing program and promised to post some of my conclusions. It’s taken me longer than anticipated with a couple of bits of work and some huge hosting and server issues which have kept me off here for a month but here are my thoughts…..

Quick recap Google Page Creator will be an online tool to make it easier for people to create and publish their own web sites similar to Yahoo Site Builder and a myriad of others.

It’s pretty straightforward to select the page layout click for screenshot and has a reasonable amount of templates already a selection of templates. Like a word processor formatting fonts in bold, italics, colours etc are easy enough on the main window and you can even edit the HTML through a WYSIWYG editor if you like, though not site wide so you can’t create your own template.

It seems hard to create something truly horrible. It’s still in beta but as it is now I believe it will only compete at a lower level. It’s not for anything serious i.e. e-commerce etc but for a small start up company brochure site there may be scope. If all you’re looking to do is to put up a simple static web site then it could be a solution. You don’t need to learn XHTML, CSS or even FTP to upload images-but then you don’t with many of the CMS and Blogging packages. Having said that the great advantage with Google Page Creator is that you don’t need to fiddle around with MySQL databases or PHP configuration files. Though they’re often straighforward to anyone vaguely techy I can see how they’d confuse others.

If you want to update/create pages on a regular basis then I’d say you’re much better off going for an open source CMS solution such as Joomla Etomite or b2evolution etc or even a good solid Blogging system such as the fantastic Wordpress (I’m biaised) or dare I say employ your friendly local Web Designer (I’m biaised here to)

Where I believe it really falls down and gives it a limited market so far is that it isn’t sufficiently different from others such as Yahoo Site Builder or desktop apps like Serif Web Plus though I’d be hard pushed to recommend applications such as the latter for much beyond amateur sites. It’s just my opinion. The only real advantage it has is the lack of advertising on the sites-but it is only in Beta and the Terms of Service indicate they probably will at least put ad-words on sites. If they’re unobtrusive enough and you think you can put up with that-especially if they give you commission then that’s not the end of the world.

Of course you don’t have to keep up to date with the latest skills, technique and trends which a competent web designer will do. The latest Ajax and Ruby on Rails are great steps forward and potential for web applications and design-but a small comany site really doesn’t need them. But where Joe Public will need to be wary is avoiding it looking amateur and unprofessional if they are doing a business site.

It may be problematic to keep sites standards compliant and accessible-but then a lot of web designers don’t do this either. Fully functional, database driven and Flash filled e-commerce sites it won’t do-but for simple sites for the person with the right attitude, time and logic-go for it and try it out once it comes out of Beta-assuming it does. Otherwise I’d say you’re better off using something else as mentioned above or employing someone with the skills and knowledge.