Please note that this article assumes you have already completed the basic setup for Google Business Apps and are ready to start setting up the various applications such as Google Sites.
If not, see my articles:
- Getting Started With Google Apps for Business: Google Registration and
- How to Set Up Google Business Apps.
Google Sites
Google sites lets you create internal websites for your organization or external websites for the whole wide Web without having to know HTML.
The coolest thing about this is how easy it is to set permissions and create sites for different audiences. Basically just by selecting a radio button you can let only certain individuals have access to the sites you create, make them accessible to all the people in your company, or make them public and accessible to everyone.
You need to remember that Google Sites, as it stands, is a tool for creating simple websites. If you're looking to create a full featured ecommerce site or a website integrated with a database, this website creation app is not for you.
How to Make a Google Site
1) Click on 'Sites' in the vertical menu on the left side of the page in the Google apps setup wizard to access this feature. The welcome screen will direct you to configure your Google Sites settings. Click on 'Settings' on the blue horizontal menu ribbon at the top of the page to do this.
You will see a page titled Sites settings come up with three tabs, 'General', 'Templates' and 'Web Address Mapping'.
Under the 'General' tab, choose the sharing options you want, allowing users to share Google sites outside your domain or not.
- Users cannot share sites outside yourdomain.com
- Users can share sites outside yourdomain.com but will receive a warning each time
- Users can share sites outside yourdomain.com without any warning
- Users can make sites public
This is also the tab of settings where you can change the URL of your sites access if you like, from the default http://sites.google.com/a/yourdomain.com to http://sites.yourdomain.com.
The 'Templates' tab allows you to enable custom Google sites templates and to choose which templates to highlight in your template list – those provided by Google or up to five custom templates you’ve uploaded. It also shows which template categories are available for your sites.
The 'Web Address Mapping' tab allows you to add new web addresses so users can access your sites through one of your subdomains.
2) Once you chosen the settings you want, return to the Google Apps setup wizard by clicking on 'Setup' on the blue horizontal menu ribbon at the top of the page again. Return to the Google Sites welcome page if it doesn't automatically come up by clicking on 'Sites' in the vertical menu on the left side of the page.
3) At the bottom of the Google Sites welcome page, you need to click 'Next' to access your Sites. This will bring up the Google Sites page where you will see options to create, delete and browse the Google Sites of your domain. There is also a search box so you can search through the sites that you have created.
4) Click on 'Create' to make a Google site.
On the page that appears, you will select a blank Google sites template for your site, browse the gallery for more templates (which is what I did) and name your site.
Google site templates can be viewed by category, such as Business collaboration, activities and events, personal and family, government and non-profits. The Business collaboration category offers templates such as professional site, training site, intranet site, project tracking etc.
You can preview templates before you select one; click on 'Use template' when you've made your choice. A selection of site themes is also available.
I chose the Intranet Google site template.
This took me back to the Google site page where I had to name my site again. (Why I don't know – once should be enough.)
(Basic tip: If the choose a theme, the lighter the background the better if you want to use black text – and you probably do because black text is just easier to read, especially for anyone with 'aging' eyes.)
If you click on 'More options' at the bottom of the page, you will also be able to assign site categories, enter a site description, and choose who to share the page with, everyone at your organization, only people you specify or anyone in the world.
When you're ready, click on the 'Create' button at the top of the page again to make your Google site.
Comments / Tips on Using Google Site Templates / Sites
It took me the longest time to figure out how to edit various pages/sections of the Intranet Google site Template. The home template page has hyperlinks to each of the different pages of the website, such as calendar, announcements, etc.
When I followed these links, I kept wanting to just click and replace the placeholder text – and nothing happened. And there were no instructions anywhere on the template pages as to how to use them. (Dear Google – the big placeholder boxes near the top of the pages that you have filled with garbage text would be an excellent place to throw in a few instructions.)
Generally, using the Google Sites templates is not very intuitive. One of the pages of the Intranet Google site template is the Calendar. Logically I wanted to embed a Calendar that all my small business’s staff could access and update.
But even after I had figured out that I had to click on the 'Edit page' icon at the top right of the page and move the page into editing mode before I could do anything, it took a fair bit of bumbling trial and error to figure out how to get the calendar I wanted where I wanted it.
Left-clicking on the Google calendar placeholder did nothing. Right-clicking did nothing.
Instead, I discovered that I had to use the 'Insert' menu at the top left of the webpage (a menu that only shows up when the page is in editing mode) and then select 'Calendar' from the resulting dropdown menu, which allowed me to pick the calendar I wanted to insert.
The Calendar insertion worked like a charm and is viewable by week, month or agenda and printable – but seems to have no interactive features available directly on the showing webpage. I was hoping that I and other staff would be able to click on an Calendar event entry to modify it, see details, or even indicate attendance, but once again, clicking on a Calendar entry seems to do nothing. Maybe there is some particular Google App or feature that I don't have that does this that I don't know about.
One Google Sites template feature that I really find handy is the ability to easily find and revert to previous versions. At one point when I was attempting to customize the Directory, I managed to somehow delete the placeholder as well as the text within it. Under the 'More' button at the top right of the screen, I just selected 'Revision history', bringing up a list of revisions and making it easy to choose one before I had messed it up.
Like every other aspect of Google Apps I've experienced so far, Google Sites is plagued by constant small failures. For instance, when trying to customize the Contact page of the Intranet template, which consists of a title, text placeholder and spreadsheet form, I was not able to get the Spreadsheet form to work properly. In Edit view, the error message "copy from site template failed: try copy again".
I don't mind an occasional glitch, but this kind of repeated failure is really annoying. Google really needs to spend some time cleaning these apps up; after all, these apps are part of a suite of apps designed for business use that people are paying for.
My grade for Google Sites – B. Using Google Sites to customize sites is certainly not intuitive and you need to remember that this is a tool for creating basic websites, but creating sites is easy and the simplicity of setting permissions is impressive.
Read More Articles in this series on Google Business Apps
