With everyone talking about responsive web design, and creating websites that will work on any device, Google Web Designer seems to be a pretty good option. I have my reservations, though, when it comes to it’s SEO-friendliness. But most of that can be easily fixed.
I took 2 minutes. Really, only 2 minutes, to download and test out Google Web Designer on a recently-acquired domain name, Streaming Video, where I wanted to put up a real basic web page. Since that domain was previously a parked domain, and Google typically doesn’t parked domains, I wanted to put up a real basic web page so that it get re-indexed again. Once the site’s re-indexed again properly and not considered to be a “parked domain” by Google, I’ll work on developing the site.
So, in the meantime, using Google Web Designer, I took 2 minutes to put up a web page:
Granted, it’s not that pretty, it will work on multiple screens (desktop, phone, tablet, etc.), and will get indexed. That’s the point of it.
I have a few comments about Google Web Designer, though:
— The title tag was pretty easy to add. When you create a new file, it’s right there for you to enter the title tag.
— You have to enter a meta description tag manually in the code. I couldn’t find any easy way to enter a meta description tag. In fact, you have to actually know the proper meta tag code. I would think that Google would make it easy to enter one of these tags, and encourage people to do so. But no, it’s not that easy.
— The CSS code is put in the html code. I would rather Google create a separate .CSS file automatically for you rather than put all the code in the html. You can save the .CSS file separately, and there’s a way to do that easily. But the default should be to put the code in a separate file, not in the html file itself. The default doesn’t comply with SEO best practices.
— Just for a real simple table, Google Web Designer creates a huge number of DIV tags. Okay, I can understand that, but why not use a real basic table?
— No templates, themes, or samples are included. You start with a blank screen, literally. So, you have to be a web designer (which I’m not) in order to create a site.
Overall, my first impression of Google Web Designer is that it really reminds me of Microsoft FrontPage or Microsoft Publisher. It’s simpler, and the code it creates tends to look much more simpler than all the unnecessary code that Microsoft creates (which is a good thing). It’s not very SEO friendly out of the box, but that’s still okay, since it will keep SEOs like me working far into the future. Badly coded sites are an SEOs dream, as there’s plenty of stuff for us to fix.