| Well, after many years of messing around with HTML and various self-hosted CMS solutions, I decided that "enough is enough". At the beginning of this summer (2008), I wanted to set up my own personal site that "just works" but meets my aesthetic and usability requirements, which is satisfied by very few projects--commercial or open-source. Although I think some efforts like Plone, Drupal, and Joomla! have enormous potential and are useful to my research and business efforts, I have decided that Google Sites is the winner when it comes to maintaining a personal web site and is even quite adept at handling the needs of small groups, such as the Emerging Technologies Laboratory. It's also a great way to set up ad hoc sites for folks with fewer technical requirements. Given my interactions with folks outside of my own discipline, I find it a clear win. I set up the site, and the rest more or less takes care of itself. Better yet, I don't have to worry about it "going down", even though we are blessed with very good computing resources in my department. In any event, I think everyone should try out this excellent software. I held off on making my reommendation untitl I saw that academic and business users of Google Apps for Your Domain can now establish URLs for all public sites. So, for example, my own personal site is reachable via http://gkt.etl.luc.edu. This is accomplished by nothing more than our friend known as the DNS CNAME (think "host alias"). This name is then mapped to the Google SItes instance via a web address mapping. Anyway, in the interests of clarity, I should point out that this is yet another example of where "less is more". I have been a long-time fan of Plone and other CMS technologies. These continue to serve many needs well but mostly in situations "for geeks only". That said, Google Sites is not as customizable as other self-hosted solutions, such as Plone. So for those of you reading who are into fancy HTML/CSS pages, this isn't for you. But it's the perfect solution for many academics and software professionals who are still trying to "go it alone" by hand-coding HTML pages and navigation structure, often resulting in a site that fails to deliver in just about all respects. I continue to be amazed at the number of individual home pages I see out there that are more or less useless and show little evidence of being maintained. (Mine used to be one of them, sad to say.) So if you are looking for software that will allow you to stay focused on your job (being a professor in my case) and avoid editing/formatting web pages, Google Sites is definitely worth a serious look! |