New webhost

I've been using GoDaddy for my webhosting for quite some time. The main reason I choose GoDaddy was because it was easy, no contract, cheap, and the WebSite Tonight template based hosting made it very quick and easy to put together quite a good looking site (oh, and my domain was registered with them). The bad stuff about GoDaddy though is that:

• WebSite Tonight is limited to 5 pages
• The ongoing fees are a bit steep for 5 pages
• The user interface is dreadful - mainly because it's so painfully slow

So, it was time for a change. After a bit of research, and quite a lot of R&D, I've successfully implemented the website using Google Sites. It took me much longer than I'd anticipated, mainly because Google Sites strongly encourages usage of the built in templates and prevents things like embedded objects, CSS editing and extra CSS files. To get the same look and feel as the old site I had to turn off most of the Google Sites features and choose a template that had styles that didn't interfere with how I wanted things. Then I did a lot of hand coding of HTML...

One of the major features that attracted me to Google Sites was the availability of a very large range of widgets that you can embed in the site - iGoogle Apps. These demo really well, but (so far in my limited experience) if they're not Google produced ones then they leave quite a lot to be desired. For example, I spent most of Sunday afternoon trying to get a slideshow of my portfolio images which are stored on flickr. There are heaps of iGoogle flickr apps, but none are very good and most are extremely limited and have almost no options. But, use the Picassa widget (made by Google) and it looks good, works straight out of the box, and is quite customisable (would like more, but hey, it's not too bad).

Another interesting thing is the ability to use Google Spreadsheet forms as feedback forms. When a user submits their information it goes straight into the Google Spreadsheet and you can set up email notifications. The moral to the story is if you're deep in the Google pot then things work well, otherwise forget Google Sites and look elsewhere.