Sunday, May 14, 2006
Playing with Google Pages
As noted earlier, I've created a Google Pages account for the Castro Valley Community Band. I'm very impressed with Google Pages as a tool for creating basic pages like thhe band's -- the main reason being the ease of editing. As band members and their families have submitted pictures, I've added them; as events have been scheduled or completed, I've updated the appropriate pages. It takes just minutes, and no FTP is involved.
The downsides are many but minor. There's no built-in table function, and no linking within pages with anchor tags; probably the most bothersome (for me) is the handling of inheritance in stylesheets -- there's no "clear styles and start over" button for text. And, of course, the pages are template-driven, so that limits creativity -- but the template I've chosen is simple, clean, and attractive, so it's fine with me. (A lot of template-created web pages in other creation tools are unnecessarily busy or gaudy, in my opinion. How about some dignity, people?) I'm also looking forward to the Google Pages team adding a hit counter, guest book, and a way to meld Blogger pages into the site. The last two are probably one in the same challenge.
One other thing regarding the Castro Valley Community Band site: I made a donation to the band in the form of a domain-name purchase. You can now reach the site by way of www.CastroValleyBand.com.
The downsides are many but minor. There's no built-in table function, and no linking within pages with anchor tags; probably the most bothersome (for me) is the handling of inheritance in stylesheets -- there's no "clear styles and start over" button for text. And, of course, the pages are template-driven, so that limits creativity -- but the template I've chosen is simple, clean, and attractive, so it's fine with me. (A lot of template-created web pages in other creation tools are unnecessarily busy or gaudy, in my opinion. How about some dignity, people?) I'm also looking forward to the Google Pages team adding a hit counter, guest book, and a way to meld Blogger pages into the site. The last two are probably one in the same challenge.
One other thing regarding the Castro Valley Community Band site: I made a donation to the band in the form of a domain-name purchase. You can now reach the site by way of www.CastroValleyBand.com.
