Group domain
Our group, XJBEI—a mailing list primarily, now has a permanent home. I signed on for a domain solution last month via Google Apps: Families and Groups standard edition. In addition to some collaborative tools like Google Docs, the domain provides our private group with a much desired identity online.
Being essentially a closed mailing list, a complementing website wasn’t really a requirement, so I didn’t sign on for a hosting solution. Creating a static homepage using Page Creator was too bland and almost useless as a static page. I tried mapping to our existing blog, but unfortunately domain mapping on Wordpress.com isn’t free. Blogger, however does allow domain mapping and it’s almost instant. I turned off Pages within Apps dashboard; and set xjbei.org under Blogger’s Settings→Your domain.
All that for $10 bucks. Not bad—considering a failed attempt to get it running as a paid sub-domain on homestead years ago for as high as $50.
For $10, you get all Google goodies, 200 email accounts (you can request for more, if you need for your group), a start page where you can custom plug group news (like the one we have, where a widget pulls feed items from our website updates). The best, of course, is having a collaborative environment for Documents, which I think is fantastic.