How do I make Google Apps and Page Creator work together?

March 31, 2008 12:04 PM

How do I get Google Apps and Google Page Creator to work together?

A friend asked me to set up him a very simple web page for him. He owns his own domain, which he wants to use as the page url address (www.hisdomain.com) and he also wanted to use the domain name as his email address ([e-mail]). After some googling I read that you can use a custom domain in Page Creator so thought Google Apps combined with Page Creator would do the trick. I registered his domain with Apps, set up his mail, etc. but now can't find a link anywhere in Apps to Page Creator. I see a link to Sites but that seems like a completely different application. And if I just go to the normal Page Creator site it asks for an email sign in and his apps address isn't working there. So I have two questions:

- can I set up a Page Creator site using a Google Apps address or do I need to sign up for separate gmail account for that? I was hoping he could administer the site and and his email all from the same place.

- if I need to sign up for a separate gmail account to use Page Creator, how do I then use his apps domain as the url address for the website?

posted by gfrobe to technology (4 comments total)

Page Creator is here. You can sign in with the same Google Account.

To make your custom domain work with the Google Pages, you need to set up domain forwarding. Here are instructions for doing this with a domain host (GoDaddy) and Google Pages.
posted by junesix at 12:49 PM on March 31, 2008

Google Sites is very cool. Don't dismiss it as an option.
posted by idb at 1:29 PM on March 31, 2008

Thanks but as I mentioned, I can't sign in with the Apps domain email address ([e-mail]) as Page Creator doesn't seem to accept a non-gmail address. So I guess I would need to sign up for a separate gmail account.

I think I found out part of my answer. Although I read in many places that Google Page Creator was part of the Apps suite, this no longer seems to be the case as Page Creator was recently replaced by Sites in Apps. I'll definitely explore that but Sites seems to be more geared toward collaborative wiki style pages rather than standard web pages.

As for forwarding the domain, wow, that's complicated especially as I don't use Go Daddy and didn't use google to register the domain (registered through 1&1). Anyone know of a simpler way to do this?
posted by gfrobe at 1:36 PM on March 31, 2008

Damn, feeling foolish now. Just created a google account and a page creator site, went into 1&1 control panel, hit one button to forward the domain to the URL and that worked fine. So please disregard all of my above questions!
posted by gfrobe at 1:56 PM on March 31, 2008