Alternavites to Google Pages

Are you using Google Pages like me? Have you checked out if we have alternatives for Google Pages? I set out today in search of a free, user-friendly and web 2.0 based products which will help in building personal and community web sites. And I did find a few interesting sites for you to think before you build your site using Google pages! Initially when google make out with Google Pages in the Google Labs, I have thought the reason why it was built when they have Blog service in place up and running. Blogging was and is meant to provide a fast way to publish personal and community information and share content on internet. But I still wonder what would have come of Blogger if Google have introduced multi page blog site or combined Google Pages power with Blogger.

Leaving this though behind, lets see our alternatives to Google Pages: Jimdo , WetPaint, Wikia and WikiDot. Searching the net lead me to two types of site creation "webware". One the normal multi page site creator and the other wiki style. Still all these products or webware have made their best efforts to make it user-friendly, free, and ya an alternative to Google Pages.

Defintly all these products had its pros and cons and I am not going to complete my analysis within a day. I shall give details of each product later but for now a intro to these products will do..

Jimdo is a php based multi page site creation tool. It has both free version and a pro version. The major difference in pro and free is the storage and the ability implement own layout. Here is the list of features. Another attraction for Jimdo is its guest book and image gallery.

Wetpaint is the wiki styled site creator with large amount of layouts and styles to choose from. It has EasyEdit toolbar which helps in editing the page faster than Google pages and Jimdo. Apart from these advantages, wetpaint has functionality to add Calender events, image gallery etc. Users also have easy access to invite people to his wiki site and also to email the pages in the wiki. They also feature a search box for each wetpaint site.

Wikia is yet another wiki based site creator which is more community centric. The home page itself has a list of categorized wikis. It also features a "Featured Wikia" box where one of Wikia is featured. Wikia also have multiple language support and the site looks like typical wikipedia site. Wikia also features a built-in search box and tab options like article,discussion, edit and history just like wikipedia or any wiki styled web site.


And now the final product wikidot, also follows the wiki style and claims its greatest feature as being "free, free, free!!!". Wikidot also provides the easy tools to create and modify the contents. It also support heavily the concept of community. Their Module concept helps in building interactive portals.

So with these four products introduced, I am sure you all have to think before taking up Google Pages as your site hosting option. And hold I have not mentioned Yahoo's Geocites. I started my personal site with it and have left it long ago, I will see what yahoo done in these years to compete with Googles and others products later.