As previously announced, Google Page Creator will be closed and all the web pages will be migrated to Google Sites. Here's the migration plan:

"Google Page Creator will be shut down in June, 2009. To make the transition to Sites as smooth and easy as possible for Page Creator users, we will be doing an automatic import of Page Creator pages to Google Sites, which will include moving pages to Google Sites and redirecting visits to googlepages.com URLs to their new location on Google Sites. From now until this import begins June 1, Page Creator users who don't want to be moved to Google Sites have the option to download their content, host it on another service, and redirect their existing URL. Please note that Google Sites does not support JavaScript, some forms of HTML, or web hosting."

To find more details about the migration and choose if you want to download your sites, visit Google Pages.


What is Google Page Creator?

Launched in 2006 as an experimental service, Page Creator was a testbed for a rich-text editor that will later be added to other Google services. "Google Page Creator is a free tool that lets you create web pages right in your browser and publish them to the web with one click. There's no software to download and no web designer to hire," Google described the service at launch. For each Page Creator site, Google offered 100 MB of file storage, 41 predefined themes, a basic image editor and the option to insert Google Gadgets.

The service has been released two weeks before Google acquired Writely, which later became a part of Google Docs.



Should you migrate to Google Sites?

It seems that Google doesn't plan to add file hosting and custom JavaScript/CSS support in Google Sites, so many of the pages built using Google Page Creator will only be partially moved to Google Sites and the files uploaded to Page Creator will be removed.

"Google Sites is an online application that makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. With Google Sites, people can quickly gather a variety of information in one place -- including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and text -- and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, their entire organization, or the world," according to the help center.

"Google Sites does not support custom JavaScript or CSS at this time for security reasons. Many embeddings are available on Google Sites through Google Gadgets (insert -> More Gadgets...), but arbitrary JavaScript and CSS will not work once the content is migrated to Google Sites. If this is a critical part of your site, we recommend exporting your content to another service," explains the FAQ page.

It's unfortunate that Google decided to discontinue the service without providing a good replacement. Page Creator was a simple rich-text editor for HTML pages and a basic file hosting service, while Google Sites is better suited for wikis and collaborative sites.

Finding an alternative

A decent alternative to Page Creator is Weebly, but if you know a better service, post a link in the comments. You can export the files from Page Creator as a ZIP archive, then create a Weebly site and upload the files by dragging the File element. All the files uploaded to Weebly will have URLs like:

http://www.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/3/4/1234/report.pdf

Now you can go to Google Page Creator's migration page, click on "opt out" and enter Weebly's address:

http://www.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/3/4/1234/
(use the address corresponding to your Weebly account).

All the files and pages hosted by Page Creator will be redirected to the new locations (Google uses permanent redirects).

Update: the exporting tool is no longer available, now that Google Page Creator no longer exists.

You probably heard that Google intends to close Google Page Creator and migrate the users to Google Sites, a service that seems to be targeted to a different audience and that lacks many features available in Page Creator. Google Sites will add some of the missing features by the time Google closes Page Creator, but those who want to move to a different service or maybe to buy a domain can already export the files.

Requirement #1. There are three kinds of files that are trapped inside Page Creator: uploaded files and web pages created using the editor which can be public or unpublished. The following exporting tool can only work for uploaded files and the public web pages. If you have pages that are unpublished and you want to export them, click on "Publish all changes" in the sidebar. You can undo this action later.

Requirement #2. Another prerequisite for the exporting tool is a software that downloads all the files linked from a page. For Internet Explorer, try the excellent download manager FlashGet (I use the classic version). For Firefox, there's an extension called DownThemAll that has some of the features from FlashGet. In both cases, you'll have to restart the browser before continuing. As usually, Opera users don't need third-party software for advanced features: there's a sidebar panel that shows all the links from a page.

How to export the files.

All sites from Google Page Creator have a sitemap that lists all the public files from a site: it's available at SITENAME.googlepages.com/sitemap.xml. Just go to your site's homepage and add /sitemap.xml in the address bar. To copy the content of the XML file in the box below, you could right-click, select "view source" and copy the code (for Firefox, Opera) or open the file http://SITENAME.googlepages.com/sitemap.xml in Notepad.

After clicking on "Obtain URLs", you should see a pop-up window that lists all the files from your Page Creator site. Right-click inside the page and select "Download all by Flashget" or "DownThemAll!", depending on your browser. Make sure to check "All files" in DownThemAll and to choose a folder where the files will be copied. In Opera, press F4, click on the "Links" panel, select all the links using Ctrl-A and click on "Save to Download Folder".


Unfortunately, there's still some manual editing you need to do for the pages created using the editor: replace <img src="name.gif/name-full.jpg" style="border: 0pt none ;"> and similar code with <img src="name.gif" style="border: 0pt none ;">.

Two free alternatives to Page Creator are Weebly and Synthasite. Wall Street Journal has an article that explains how to buy a domain and host a site without paying too much.

{ Inspired by Peter Dawson. }

This year, Google discontinued a lot of services: Browser Sync, Hello, Send to SMS and Send to Phone extension. Another Google Labs experiment is about to be discontinued: Page Creator, a simple way to create web pages without knowing HTML. Google Page Creator's rich text editor is now included in many other Google services, but Google decided to focus on the more powerful Google Sites.

We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our 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.

It's not clear if Google will also move the files uploaded to Page Creator, so you can continue to use them. "For migrated sites we will automatically redirect your googlepages.com URL to the appropriate sites.google.com URL to ensure your visitors aren't lost due to the transition. In addition, we will be providing a means for you to download your site so that you can easily export it to other services if you choose to do so," explains Google.

Instead of having two overlapping services, Google decided to develop only one of them. "By concentrating our work on one product we hope to ultimately create a superior product than if we maintained the two products separately."


I'm not sure if Google Sites is a good replacement for Page Creator, since the interface is more complicated and there are many limitations: you can't add JavaScript code, embedded objects or iframes, it's more difficult to upload files and to setup a simple site.

{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Google Page Creator, the free tool that lets you build simple web pages without knowing HTML, has received a small update.

Until today, the only thing you couldn't delete from a web page was the homepage, but now you can delete it too. To delete an entire site, you can select all the pages and remove them. Unfortunately, you'll have to delete the uploaded files one at a time or hide the site in the settings. But even if you delete everything from the web site, there's no way to delete the site itself.

Another improvement is that any page can become a homepage, so you can have multiple potential homepages. To change the homepage, go to the settings and select one of the pages you've created from the Homepage option.


It would be nice to see more features in Google Page Creator that could make it a part of Google Docs: collaborative editing, site search, folders, custom templates.

If you have a site hosted by Google Page Creator, be prepared for a surprise. Google automatically builds a sitemap file that lists each and every file from your site created or only hosted by Page Creator.

The address of the sitemap file is http://sitename.googlepages.com/sitemap.xml, so anyone who knows the URL of your site (or just your Gmail address) can find all the files from your site. Some sitemaps are even included in Google search.

That means you shouldn't use Page Creator to upload personal files because even if you don't link to them, their addresses are easy to find in the sitemap. But there's also a bright side: you don't have to build a sitemap for your site to submit it to Google Webmasters Central.

Also, each site has a RSS feed that contains only the pages created with the online editor. The feed is available at: http://sitename.googlepages.com/rss.xml.


{ Via A consuming experience. }

When you add a photo to Google Page Creator, you'll see new options. You can now crop a photo, rotate it, change the brightness, mix it with another photo, change the contrast, reduce the colors or sharpen the photo. Basically you can apply simple effects from your browser. In the screenshot below, I've used the mash-up effect.



Now every page created in Google Page Creator can be easily accessed from a mobile phone, as Google redirects it to the transcoded version, the same way it does with the search results. Of course if you manage to enter the long URL correctly.

Also interesting:
Hide a site in Google Page Creator
Page Creator supports JavaScript

If you want to create pages or edit them, without anyone even suspecting you have a site at Google Page Creator, you have to go to "Site settings" and check "Hide this site". This way, none of your pages will be visible until you uncheck that option.

It's also a good replacement for "Delete this site", because your uploaded files will be unavailable too.

You can create four more sites, using one account. This feature was initially experimental, then it wasn't available, and now it's back.

Google Page Creator has a new feature: you can create up to five sites using a single account.

First, enable "experimental features" in Site Settings. Then go to the page manager and click on "Create a site with a different address", choose an address and that's it. As the address has the format *.googlepages.com, you can't choose the name of an existing Gmail account.

This is a good way to overcome the limitation of having only 100 MB space and only 100 files, without creating a new account.

The answer to the question: "How do I create a new site?" from help has changed from:

"During this initial testing period, we're only allowing each account to have a single site. However, this site can be comprised of up to 100 pages. We'll soon be offering support for multiple sites, but don't have any specific timeline to share at this point."

to

"Select the Create a site with a different address link that appears near the top of the Page Manager."

Related:
Add gadgets to Google Pages
Free website monitoring

Google Page Creator, the service that lets you create and publish static web pages hosted by Google, lets you embed Javascript code in the pages. You just have to go to a editable area, click "Edit HTML" and type your script. That means you can include in your pages AdSense, Analytics code, Ajax and other interactive features.

Until now, users had to create HTML files offline and upload them in Page Creator, which was pretty difficult, especially if we think that the service wants to let you "build high-quality web pages without having to learn HTML or use complex software".

Related:
Add gadgets to Google Page Creator

Google Page is a service from Google that allows you to create simple static pages with a WYSIWYG online editor. There is a page on GooglePages.com that reviewed the product.

"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, which isn't possible with the Google Page Creator's Page/HTML editor, because it removes objects that use features such as JavaScript, which usually are in elements like script or embed in the HTML source."

So if you want Flash, Google AdSense, Google Maps, Google Video, Java, JavaScript, music, stat counters, or videos, create your pages offline and upload them to Google servers. And if you think the whole point of Google Page Creator was to create pages online, you're wrong. What webhosting provides you with 100 MB quote, 10 MB maximum size for files, unlimited bandwidth (well, almost) and no restriction for file types (mp3, avi, exe, zip) - all for free, and without including their ads in your pages?

Google developed a simple WYSISYG editor for web pages. You can find it and play with it at pages.google.com. You can use up to 100MB of space for your pages and uploaded files. Your site will have an address like http:// yourgmailusername.googlepages.com/myferret.

Update: "Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. " Like Google Analytics and Web Accelerator, Google Page Creator stopped creating new accounts due to heavy demand.