Google Sites Classic

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

~ the eulogy ~

Google Sites was the kind of free hosting i would have needed in 2003 but did not need in 2008. By the time it launched on February 28, 2008 i had been writing for the web for a decade. The product was aimed at a different user. Schools and sports teams, plus small-business owners who had a Google Apps account and wanted a homepage without renting hosting. For that audience it was the simplest tool google ever shipped. You picked a template, you typed, you saved, and you had a URL.

The engine underneath was JotSpot, a wiki-platform startup google acquired in October 2006 and folded into the Google Apps suite for the launch. The 2008 product was clean. A 2010 update added gadgets and themes, and a 2012 update added a slightly nicer template gallery. After that the product did not change much for four years. Google was busy with Google+ and the Sites team appears to have been mostly reassigned.

In November 2016 Google announced New Sites, an entirely separate product with a completely different codebase, modeled after the modern Google Docs aesthetic. The old Sites kept running but got the brand-suffix Classic. The migration tooling between the two products did not work cleanly. Pages with custom gadgets or HTML embeds often broke during conversion, leaving thousands of school class pages stuck on a platform google was about to retire. Google announced the final deprecation in May 2021 and shut Classic Sites down on September 1, 2021. Pages that had not been migrated by then disappeared.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

Classic Sites was the only google product that came close to filling the GeoCities-shaped hole for the Google Apps generation. The audience was different. The free GeoCities user was a teenager experimenting with HTML. The Classic Sites user was a teacher publishing a syllabus or a parent volunteering to run the soccer team page. The aesthetic was sober where GeoCities had been chaotic. The url was sites.google.com slash whatever, never a personal subdomain, which always read as a tell that you were on someone else's platform.

~ the long tail ~

Most Classic Sites pages were never updated. Schools moved to Microsoft Teams or to dedicated education tools. Small businesses moved to Squarespace or Wix. The class pages that did stay current usually had a teacher who had built the page on Classic Sites in 2010 and refused to learn New Sites in 2017. When the September 2021 shutdown arrived, the actual deletions were mostly content that nobody had visited in five years.

~ what got buried with it ~

The interesting losses were the internal company wikis. A lot of Google Apps for Domains customers in 2009 to 2013 had used Classic Sites for documentation that never moved to Confluence or Notion. Those pages were the deep institutional memory of small companies that had outgrown the platform years ago. When Classic Sites died, several wiki migrations that had been on the backlog for a decade either got rushed in 2021 or got abandoned. Some companies discovered after the shutdown that their original org chart and their early customer FAQ had been on the platform, and that nobody had a copy.

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