Great News For Small Businesses
If you are willing to take the time to start building a website by yourself for your small business, Google has a feature called Google Apps for Your Domain Name. Google announced Friday the additional service of anyone being able to register a domain name directly through Google.
For 10 dollars annually, a person can register a domain name privately and start using Google Apps for Your Domain Name. The Google Apps for Your Domain Name includes the features such as a custom start page, web page design, or using the Gmail application with your own domain name.
You can pick any combination of Gmail, instant messaging, Google Calendar, web page design and hosting tools, and the start page. For example, maybe you just want email. Or if you’re happy with your existing mail solution, you can select only calendar and instant messaging tools. Or maybe you want it all — it’s up to you.
Prior to Google partnering with several domain name registrars and offering private registration for your own domain name, it was BYOD, Bring Your Own Domain name and setting up the proper DNS settings for email and hosting at the domain control panel of whatever hosting provider a person was using. Google still provides the DNS information necessary if someone already has a domain name registered with another provider and wants to use the free Google Apps for Your Domain Name, but now it is easier than ever before for someone to register a domain name through Google and be online immediately or just using the free custom email services, free calendars, instant messaging, with free multiuser accounts.
It is important to understand that the free yet extremely powerful service provided by Google is great for email, calendar, online voice or instant messages with others in the corporation and assigned users, and other internal web apps. However, the Google Page Creator is rather simple in its approach to website design. An example of Google Page Creator can be seen at Creating A Web On The Internet. That isn’t to say that the website is not professional, it just means that the provided templates are somewhat of a standard simple format with the abilities to change some of the colors and backgrounds. This can be great for a small start-up business that does not have the funds to invest into website development and would like to get started online ASAP.
Google Page Creator We believe that creating and publishing simple web pages should be quick, easy and free. Google Page Creator lets you choose from a host of templates and customize them with your organization’s content and images, all within a simple what-you-see-is-what-you-get online interface. When you’re happy with how things look, publish your pages to the web with a single click.
Google is coming out next year with a premium version of Google Apps for Your Domain Name. I am not sure at this time what additional features will be included in that service nor has the price been announced. A representative from Google, in a recent webcast did mention that the pricing for the premium version of Google Apps for Your Domain Name would be competitive with other hosting services.
Here is one feature that I would like to see. Google recently updated their blogging service to the New Blogger service. The New Blogger service has some pretty cool features in and of itself for building professional blogs. It would really be cool if the Google Aps for Your Domain Name could include the features found in the New Blogger. It would also be nice if several blogs could be built or used off the main domain name as a file name or as a subdomain to the URL. Right now, as far as I can see, there is no way to have hosting by Google Apps for Your Domain Name and also have a blog under your domain name. Maybe this will be one of the features in the premium service for Google Apps for Your Domain Name.
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