search engine optimization

web design & development

We're seeing more and more people migrate their data to the Google cloud with email, calendars, spreadsheets, word documents, and more. Controlled, shared access to your data means great flexibility and convenience in a collaborative work environment.

It can also mean greater data security, since your data exists in the cloud, spread out over many servers and a hardware failure is statistically unlikely to cause you to lose data. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't maintain your own backup policy, but you can feel confident that Google isn't going to lose your files. We've been dedicating significant data to the cloud for over a year and have not (knock on digital wood) had any blips.

We've noticed another benefit to using google docs: smoother content copying into web site CMS systems.

Most of the sites we build include a content management system designed to allow the site owner significant, 24/7 control over his/her page content. Most of these systems include an editor function that mimics word processors with formatting controls designed to be familiar to users of Microsoft Word and other popular desktop word processing software. These generally do a good job, but with regular version updates to web browsers and the word processing programs, we find that now and then some behaviors become unpredictable such as copying and pasting from a Word document to a web site. Incompatible formatting and characters like to tag along from the Word doc and gum things up during the paste action into the web page. Most of the editors we use include a "paste from Word" function designed to combat that problem, but we find they are perhaps 70% effective at best.

The best answer we've found so far is to compose or transfer the source document to the google cloud before cutting and pasting. If you compose your web content in a google doc, you'll enjoy all of the benefits that you would have using a desktop word processor plus a much smoother transfer to your web site.


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