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Yourself

When you want to put up your own website, how free can a freebie be? By Brian O’Heir

Let’s face it, if you Google yourself and find only hits for other people who have the same name, you’re not gonna get that special feeling — that feeling of purpose, place, and accomplishment in society.

I wanted to be a search-engine somebody, with my own personal website to represent me. Also,

I wanted to share events and photos with friends and relatives. And naturally, I didn’t want to pay for it!

Initially I searched for “free websites,” but the ones I found were hardly free. Intuit is free for

1 month, and $5 per month thereafter. Microsoft is free for 1 year, but then you pay even more. The Yahoo! Geocities Page has the word “free” all over it, but nothing can be done without paying money. Freewebs.com is genuinely free, but is ad-support-ed, and really slow, and it crashed my browser. That kind of “free” costs too much.

One genuinely free option is Google Page Creator. It’s a Google Labs beta product, which may not work perfectly and may change as refinements are added. Probably the basic version will remain free when more powerful versions become available for license.

Currently, each Page Creator account allows you three websites with a total size of up to 100MB. Best of all, the system is extremely easy to use, and should enable literally everyone who can use a computer to build their own website.

1. SIGN UP

Go to pages.google.com and you’ll be asked to give your Gmail address. If you don’t have one, click the link at the right to create one. Your Gmail user-name will then be used to create the URL for your home page in the format http://yourgmailname. googlepages.com.

(You can also create and register your own URL, and point it to your Google site, but we’ll get to that later.)

88 Make: Volume 14

2. ADD TEXT

Click “I’m ready to create my pages” and accept the inevitable terms and conditions. You’ll now find yourself in Page Creator’s Layout Manager (Figure A). Make up a title for your page (you can change it later) and an optional subtitle. I used “Ball Toy” because I wanted to promote a toy that I designed for children and cats. Now type text in the main content section, or just copy and paste it from another window or application. Note the button bar, which allows you to format any highlighted text, including the Heading button, which lets you apply preset text formats.

3. ADD IMAGES

Click the Image button, and the Add an Image window opens. Browse and open any image file on your hard drive, and a thumbnail of it will be added to this window. Everything you upload accumulates here. Next and Prev buttons navigate through groups of eight images, with a current limit of 500 files and maximum single file size of 10MB. Click the image you want, and then the Add Image button, to place the image on your page.

4. ADJUST IMAGES

When you drag an image, text will flow around it accordingly. This feature didn’t work great and was a bit frustrating at times, particularly if the field contained no text. Temporarily placing some text to buffer images helped. Selecting any image on the page presents an Edit Image button, which opens a window where you can change size, brightness, contrast, and other features.