WHAT IS GOOGLE SITES?

Google Sites is an online application that makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. With Google Sites, people can quickly gather a variety of information in one place -- including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and text -- and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, their entire organization, or the world.

It was launched on February 28, 2008 and is currently in beta stage. It replaces Google Page Creator, Google's previous webpage creation service. All Google editorial content is licensed under Creative Commons or an Apache license.

Google Sites started out as JotSpot, a software company that offered enterprise social software. The product was targeted mainly at small-sized and medium-sized businesses. The company was founded by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, co-founders of Excite.

As of March 2009, Google Sites offers the following features:

• A web address of the form "http://sites.google.com/site/sitename/".
• A limited number of themes (23 as of September 2008).
• Limited use of HTML coding. CSS cannot be incorporated in the theme templates.
• Ability to insert videos from Google video/YouTube
• 100 MB of storage (for free account)