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Classic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008), and we've been working to make new Sites a better, more modern, more maintainable place to crea

Classic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008), and we've been working to make new Sites a better, more modern, more maintainable place to create and host websites. The vast majority of users are choosing to create their sites with new Sites, and the vast majority of current classic sites receive no edits and no traffic. We first announced this gradual plan in 2017, with an update in 2019, and now we're providing the detailed plan. The goal was to provide adequate notice for people to figure out whether migration, export, or deletion of their classic sites makes the most sense. EDIT: to the multiple people that are highlighting that 12 years is not a long time, I should clarify. I agree that 12 years in Internet time is not a long time, but it is a very long time in "how websites work" time. One of the big challenges in the website builder space, something that Google. Wix, Squarespace, have all dealt with - is that when a user publishes a website, there's an expectation around the fidelity and look-and-feel of that website. The data model and architecture for how you represent a rendered page, how you render embedded content, all are very dependent on how browsers work at that time, and the maintenance of those things can become very challenging. There was a big shift about ~7 years ago, moving away from a "pixel perfect" layout/raw html approach (Wix, Old wordpress, SQSP 5, Classic Sites), to one where there's some sort of grid-and-box approach where the render is responsive, there's reflow, there's padding and spacing and styling relative to the browser experience. It separates out content from layout to a certain degree in a way that is much more future-proofed and modern. This is how Wix ADI, Squarespace 6+, Wordpress Gutenberg, and new Sites work. For all of those transitions, there was a platform shift, that required a complete rework of how the system works. My point about "12 years" was that the model of how classic Sites works is 12 years old, and new Sites was intended to match the modern way of how websites are built and delivered.

fermienrico 6y ago
Externally, as you know, Google‘a reputation hasn’t been great when it comes to maintaining their services. What should have happened is to turn Classic Sites (and new Sites) itself into Squarespace competitor. I just see this as a massive failure of vision and execution. Why didn’t they improve classic sites and added yet another product called Sites? May be I am seeing some internal politics surface as fragmentation of product line.
- mattzito 6y ago
  Fundamentally, classic sites works differently than new sites. It's basically not possible, for example, to make a classic sites website mobile responsive. That's a table-stakes feature for website builders today. To your Squarespace comparison, Squarespace went through a similar transition - Squarespace 5 worked very similar to Classic Sites, and was replaced with Squarespace 6, which was a complete end-to-end rewrite.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    Yea, I think Google should continue to revamp things under the same product name. It is giving it a bad reputation for discontinuation of products left and right. Could have called it Classic Sites 2.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      The product name is Google Sites. With the introduction of the new configuration for that product in parallel, “classic” and “new” distinguished the available configuration. Classic now stops being the default and in a little over a year goes away, but the product (Google Sites) stays.
  - dwheeler 6y ago
    > It's basically not possible, for example, to make a classic sites website mobile responsive. Huh? Did that 10 years ago. Perhaps we have a different definition of a "classic site". To me a "classic site" is another name for a static site, that is, a website where the HTML to be served is pregenerated. Static sites are now coming back, not going away. But I always assumed that a website should reflow. Perhaps when you say "classic site" you mean "site that assumes that all users have the same display size". I agree that such classic sites are nonsense today. But they were always nonsense. At no time was there a guarantee of any particular screen size for HTML, and it's always been easy to write HTML that just reflows. If you do that, your site works just fine.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
msla 6y ago
> Classic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008) Anything I can say would only detract from this. This is modern Google.
- gtfoutttt 6y ago
  Amen. 12 years is not long in anyone's eyes except for SV.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    Then should I assume you're reading this on IE7?
- m4rtink 6y ago
  12 years is not a long time even just by enterprise software standards. The RHEL/Fedora Anaconda installer Git history goes back to 1999 (was CVS initially and then imported to Git) and that's just when tracking was first used, it existed many years before that. Also RHEL support lifecycles are 11+ years, so for RHEL 8 released in 2019, that's a commitment to ~2030 right here and there & with doing this for many years for the past releases proving the point. No wonder the most critical stuff (Bank, Stock exchnages, etc.) run on RHEL and not on some half baked Google stuff that will get deprecated from under them at a moments notice.
globular-toast 6y ago
12 years is a "very long time"? What is considered a "long time" or a "short time"?
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> Classic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008), and we've been working to make new Sites a better, more modern, more maintainable place to create and host websites. In this particular case, with Google Sites, maybe the decision was totally justified, I don't know. But, as a general trend across the technology industry, this type of explanation really bothers me, and I think it speaks to a serious mindset problem. The fact that X is old and Y is new is not a reason to replace X with Y. Hammers are old, but they're also exceedingly useful tools. Users are familiar with how hammers work, and companies have become good at manufacturing them. The question should be whether the new tool is better than the old one, and if it is, whether it's so much better that forcing every user to re-learn the new tool will be worth their while. And even then, it's worth asking why some of the largest companies in the world can't let both tools coexist, perhaps with the older one kept semi-hidden to avoid confusing new users. Anyway, sorry for picking on you, I appreciate your willingness to pop into a somewhat-hostile thread. :)
- mattzito 6y ago
  It's very fair feedback - I updated my response to highlight that the reason is not that classic sites is old, and old is bad, and new sites is new, and hence good. It's more that the way websites are built and rendered changed fundamentally ~7 years ago, and classic sites just doesn't match the way that needs to work today. All of the major website builders have tried to find a path from "raw html" to "content management system" and been unable to, and had a platform split at some point.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    I just transitioned my sites, and I really dislike the reflow and mobilification of the websites. Makes it much less useful, especially on smaller screens. Stuff (like side bar info) is hidden away behind hamburger menu buttons instead of immediately visible in a compact format. This mobilification is a fad, and like many fads it will, too, disappear and have to be replaced (requiring many work hours) because ultimately it’s less usable especially for largely static content. There’s no option to keep a similar look and feel. “Mobile first” has been forced upon us and is now, with reflow, “mobile only.” Imagine if Arxiv required PDFs to be replaced by mobilified versions? So annoying and impractical. Really disappointed. Google made a bunch of work for themselves just to reduce the usability of older web pages.

fermienrico 6y ago

Externally, as you know, Google‘a reputation hasn’t been great when it comes to maintaining their services. What should have happened is to turn Classic Sites (and new Sites) itself into Squarespace competitor. I just see this as a massive failure of vision and execution. Why didn’t they improve classic sites and added yet another product called Sites? May be I am seeing some internal politics surface as fragmentation of product line.

mattzito 6y ago
Fundamentally, classic sites works differently than new sites. It's basically not possible, for example, to make a classic sites website mobile responsive. That's a table-stakes feature for website builders today. To your Squarespace comparison, Squarespace went through a similar transition - Squarespace 5 worked very similar to Classic Sites, and was replaced with Squarespace 6, which was a complete end-to-end rewrite.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  Yea, I think Google should continue to revamp things under the same product name. It is giving it a bad reputation for discontinuation of products left and right. Could have called it Classic Sites 2.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    The product name is Google Sites. With the introduction of the new configuration for that product in parallel, “classic” and “new” distinguished the available configuration. Classic now stops being the default and in a little over a year goes away, but the product (Google Sites) stays.
- dwheeler 6y ago
  > It's basically not possible, for example, to make a classic sites website mobile responsive. Huh? Did that 10 years ago. Perhaps we have a different definition of a "classic site". To me a "classic site" is another name for a static site, that is, a website where the HTML to be served is pregenerated. Static sites are now coming back, not going away. But I always assumed that a website should reflow. Perhaps when you say "classic site" you mean "site that assumes that all users have the same display size". I agree that such classic sites are nonsense today. But they were always nonsense. At no time was there a guarantee of any particular screen size for HTML, and it's always been easy to write HTML that just reflows. If you do that, your site works just fine.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago

msla 6y ago

> Classic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008) Anything I can say would only detract from this. This is modern Google.

gtfoutttt 6y ago
Amen. 12 years is not long in anyone's eyes except for SV.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  Then should I assume you're reading this on IE7?
m4rtink 6y ago
12 years is not a long time even just by enterprise software standards. The RHEL/Fedora Anaconda installer Git history goes back to 1999 (was CVS initially and then imported to Git) and that's just when tracking was first used, it existed many years before that. Also RHEL support lifecycles are 11+ years, so for RHEL 8 released in 2019, that's a commitment to ~2030 right here and there & with doing this for many years for the past releases proving the point. No wonder the most critical stuff (Bank, Stock exchnages, etc.) run on RHEL and not on some half baked Google stuff that will get deprecated from under them at a moments notice.

globular-toast 6y ago

12 years is a "very long time"? What is considered a "long time" or a "short time"?

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

> Classic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008), and we've been working to make new Sites a better, more modern, more maintainable place to create and host websites. In this particular case, with Google Sites, maybe the decision was totally justified, I don't know. But, as a general trend across the technology industry, this type of explanation really bothers me, and I think it speaks to a serious mindset problem. The fact that X is old and Y is new is not a reason to replace X with Y. Hammers are old, but they're also exceedingly useful tools. Users are familiar with how hammers work, and companies have become good at manufacturing them. The question should be whether the new tool is better than the old one, and if it is, whether it's so much better that forcing every user to re-learn the new tool will be worth their while. And even then, it's worth asking why some of the largest companies in the world can't let both tools coexist, perhaps with the older one kept semi-hidden to avoid confusing new users. Anyway, sorry for picking on you, I appreciate your willingness to pop into a somewhat-hostile thread. :)

mattzito 6y ago
It's very fair feedback - I updated my response to highlight that the reason is not that classic sites is old, and old is bad, and new sites is new, and hence good. It's more that the way websites are built and rendered changed fundamentally ~7 years ago, and classic sites just doesn't match the way that needs to work today. All of the major website builders have tried to find a path from "raw html" to "content management system" and been unable to, and had a platform split at some point.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  I just transitioned my sites, and I really dislike the reflow and mobilification of the websites. Makes it much less useful, especially on smaller screens. Stuff (like side bar info) is hidden away behind hamburger menu buttons instead of immediately visible in a compact format. This mobilification is a fad, and like many fads it will, too, disappear and have to be replaced (requiring many work hours) because ultimately it’s less usable especially for largely static content. There’s no option to keep a similar look and feel. “Mobile first” has been forced upon us and is now, with reflow, “mobile only.” Imagine if Arxiv required PDFs to be replaced by mobilified versions? So annoying and impractical. Really disappointed. Google made a bunch of work for themselves just to reduce the usability of older web pages.