Google Page Creator

» see pages.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed google page creator. by february 2006 i already had a personal page on a turkish hosting account through ttnet and was writing the html in macromedia homesite. for whatever reason, the appeal of a wysiwyg builder tied to a gmail address did not register for me. it was the kind of product i looked at briefly when the techcrunch post landed and then closed the tab on. close enough.

google page creator launched in beta on february 23 2006 at pages.google.com. the pitch was that any gmail user got 100mb of free webspace at username.googlepages.com with a drag-and-drop editor that did not require knowing html. you picked a template, dropped in some text, uploaded a few images, and clicked publish. that was the whole product. it was google's first attempt to occupy the geocities slot for the gmail generation.

the timing was wrong on both ends. geocities was already a long-fade ghost town by 2006, yahoo would finally shut it on october 26 2009. the new personal-page audience had moved to myspace profiles, livejournal posts, blogger templates, or wordpress.com hosting. a static html page at a long googlepages subdomain answered a question almost nobody was asking by the time it shipped.

google killed page creator gradually. in october 2006 google acquired jotspot, which became google sites in february 2008. that was the replacement product. new google page creator signups closed in september 2008. existing pages stayed online until summer 2009, when google offered a migration to sites or deletion. by august 2009 the pages.google.com domain was redirecting and the product was effectively gone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the page creator interface was a single editing canvas. you dragged blocks onto the page and double-clicked to change text. files uploaded through a small panel on the side. the templates were generic mid-2000s google-blue gradients with rounded corners. you could view the raw html but not really edit it inside the tool. anything more than a personal landing page or a wedding-photos album hit the limits within an afternoon.

the 100mb cap was generous for static html in 2006 and tight for a real site by 2008. there were no databases or scripts and no custom domains, the url stayed at username.googlepages.com for the lifetime of the page. that was fine for the use case google had in mind and worthless for anything that wanted to grow into a real site.

~ the long tail ~

the page creator subdomain pattern outlived the product itself. for years after the 2009 shutdown a few search hits still pointed at googlepages.com urls that returned a generic redirect. archive.org holds many of the better-preserved pages. most of the content was probably never important enough to mourn, the value of a free 100mb static page in 2006 was always close to zero on the open web.

the broader pattern was that google would launch a personal-publishing tool, leave it on beta for two or three years, then quietly replace it with the next attempt. page creator was the first of these. google sites itself ran for years in a similar low-investment state before getting a new sites version in 2016, with the old classic sites finally shut down in 2021. the appetite for hosting personal html pages slowly drained out of google. blogger remained as the only piece of the personal-publishing stack that google kept.

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