Serendipity35

This is NOT Google Pages though I can see people confusing the two and there is some overlap. Let me write a paragraph on Pages before I talk about Sites. Google Page Creator is a free online tool that makes it very easy for anyone to create and publish nice looking web pages without HTML, software downloads or a tech background. You build & edit in your browser. One of the best features is that your pages are hosted by Google without cost. Your pages have a unique URL and if you give some thought to your username before you sign up for an account, the URL will be logical. (I prefer a URL like poetsonline.googlepages.com to swzgrp678.googlepages.com) I use Pages with students to create pages quickly for short-term projects. It's reasonable to expect students to be able to create a small site there in a week of two with existing content. For example, one student did a site on Salvador Dali and another did one on geocaching.

This is another Google Labs project which means it's still in its early stages but it is stable. Google Sites would be a good choice to set up a website to share projects,
a company intranets, for your community groups, a course site, clubs, family sites etc. I don't know that you should consider this to be a permanent home for your small business, but you can add as many pages as you like for this free testing phase. Will this become a paid service some day? Perhaps, though the more common model has been offer the free version and also a premium version, and Google is doing that. If you're interested in taking it for a test drive, login with your Gmail account to begin making pages.

Google Sites is just as easy to use as Pages. Some features: embed documents, calendars, photos, videos and gadgets directly into pages. Similar to Google Docs, there are built-in WYSIWYG editing tools. Another nice feature is that you can invite people to edit or view your content by just entering in their email address and sending an invite. That way you and your brother can work on the family reunion site or you and the other two people teaching the same course can work on a site or students can work as a team on a site (which is what I plan to try out this fall). Here's a sample site built in Google Sites for Mrs. Richau's Classroom.

Finally, for all you visual learners, here's a video intro:

I often have friends and colleagues ask me what it takes to set up their own website for a small business or their consulting or whatever. (Often this is an unsubtle way of asking if I will make a website for them.) Once you start telling most people about about buying a domain and web hosting plan$, they lose interest. Google Sites changes all that. If you go for the Google Apps Premier Edition you get 500 MB for each user account (it's 10 MB for the free version) plus 25 GB of Gmail storage, shareable calendars, real-time multi-person document editing and Google Talk free voice calls and text messaging. Check out their comparison page.