Google Page Creator Beta

WARNING: High geek content in this post!

Today Google sent me the email confirming my Google Page Creator Beta account has been created. Of course I logged on and immediately dove in. Within ten minutes I had a nice clean page up including a photo, links section, and a decent layout. See here.

The interface was simple and allowed quick editing of the basic features the average user would use. I must state here that this is for simple page creation only. While it does allow some basic editing of HTML most of the design elements are controlled by the simple CSS based layouts. The code created by the editor is pretty clean although I am disappointed they used a DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.0 Strict and then failed to configure the page layout to even fully meet the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard (according to the XHTML Validator).

The Google Pages site allows each user up to 100 MB for hosting their pages and images. This is sufficient for the casual user to post photos of the kids, vacation time, or whatever else strikes their fancy. From what I have tried so far Flash and other embedded files are not fully supported.

Final Verdict: Google Page Creator Beta is a good solution for someone wanting to post a simple webpage with photos and not much else. The simple, clean interface is great for the casual user and it doesn't require them to understand HTML or own a domain. It publishes far cleaner code than FrontPage and the CSS is coded to work with most CSS capable browsers.