Last time, we gave a short preview of Google Pages, Google’s own take at a free homepage/website-building service actually popularized by free services like Goecities and Tripod a decade ago. Now that blogs are what’s hot in the personal page space, it seems quite anachronistic for Google to set up its page-building service when there are a handful of free, usable and popular blogging packages out there, one of which is the leading Blogger.com, which Google itself owns.

But after an in-depth look at Google Pages, we thought the service merits accord, because it offers no-frills webpage designing and management to beginners even without the need to know any coding or scripting language. It’s as simple as typing up a document in a word processor, selecting the desired layout, and clicking publish. And then of course, it’s different from a blog since sites created with Google pages are not intended to be in a journal-type format, being static. Of course, you can use Google Pages to create a blog, but we don’t think this is very practical.

Here are some salient features of Google Pages:

100 MB of storage – Approximately the same amount of storage offered by low-end or free hosting accounts, 100 megabytes will allow you to store approximately 14 million words, 2 million web-sized images, or a combination thereof (of course, these are just rough estimates).

AJAX – You don’t need to refresh your browser screen to preview or load features, since everything is done dynamically by the browser, with AJAX.

Site themes – You can select among about 40 default color schemes and themes. This feature lets you choose your site’s general feel, through colors and styles.

Site layout – Google Pages lets you select your basic layout from among single-column, two-column (left or right sidebar) and three-column.

WYSIWYG/Rich Text editing – No need to learn HMTL or any other coding language. Google does the laying out for you. The most common website functions such as linking, markup (bold, italics, strikeout, alignment, font style and face) are available as options in the editor’s sidebar you can easily access with the click of the mouse.

Auto-save – You don’t have to worry about losing your work if you suddenly get disconnected or if your computer crashes. Google Pages saves your work every few seconds in draft until you hit the publish button. If you suddenly navigate out of your site editor, you can return to editing anytime after you log in.

Site preview – Great for the perfectionists out there, you can preview your actual site’s look even before publishing. Hitting the preview button would launch a new window containing the site’s look upon publishing.

One-click publish – Once you’re satisfied with your site’s look, feel and content, you can hit publish and Google will update your live (your Gmail account).googlepages.com.

Overall, Google Pages is easy to use. More advanced users might be disappointed, though, but we think that’s all right, since the service is intended for beginners and those who only need websites for personal purposes. If you need a solution for creating simple static pages, this is a good option (after all, you can actually copy the CSS and HTML to your own host later on. But if you need a site where you can easily update dynamic content, then a blogging solution or content management system would be more appropriate.