Ever wanted to quickly create a web page for your nearest book club or sports team? Or maybe a personal page that you can share with friends and family for a specific event like a wedding or birthday?
If you do a Google search, you will get hundreds of suggestions for instantly creating web pages using templates and the like, but usually you have to spend a little money. These sites will make you look beautiful and probably really customizable, but sometimes you just need to create something very simple, you don’t care what it looks like and you don’t want to spend a cent.
Google Sites can fix this problem for you because all you need is a Google account! Google Sites have been around for a long time, but they are still little known. The main reason is that Google only sells it to Google Apps for Work users, but anyone can use it. Here’s a sample website I created using Google Sites in just the last 45 minutes to write this article.
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As you can see, this is a really simple web page with a bunch of widgets added in two columns. Nothing fancy about it, but it gets the job done for a small family website. Plus, if you are a little coding and tech savvy, you can make your site look more professional. For Google Apps users, you get 10 GB of space, but for non-app users, you only get 100 MB, so this is a really small site.
By default, the site will have a URL starting with sites.google.com, but you can easily use your own domain name if you have already purchased it, or purchased it through Google Domains .or any other domain registrar.
To get started, go to sites.google.com and click the Create button to create your first website.
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To get started, you can choose from several templates such as sports team, class site, wedding, etc. Be sure to click on the “View gallery for more information” link because there are many more templates out there categorized like like activities and events, business cooperation, schools and education, clubs and organizations, etc.
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Give your site a name and then customize the end of the URL if you want. By default, it will be just sites / google.com / site / sitename. You can replace it with something else, but it must be unique among all Google sites in the world. If you chose a blank template, you can also choose a theme. Click the “I’m not a robot” button and then click “Create” at the top.
You will be taken to the home page of your new site. An important section is at the top, where you can edit the current page, create a new page, and change settings for the page and site.
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The first thing I suggest you do is click on the gear icon and then click on the Manage Site link at the bottom.
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From here, you can configure a lot of parameters like site name, site description, landing page, etc. You can also customize a site notification that will display a message to all site visitors. If you want, you can also configure Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools here. At the bottom there is an option to make the site responsive by configuring it for mobile phones.
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On the left side, you can also see the latest website activity, all your pages, attachments you download, page templates you can use, app scripts, sharing and permissions, and themes / colors / fonts. The last section allows you to add a header image and change the font, color and size of text in various sections of the site like content area, sidebar, navigation, etc.
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Once you’ve configured your site settings, it’s time to make sure you choose the right layout for your entire site. To do this, go back to your home page and click the gear icon again. This time, click Change Site Layout.
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It is very easy to change the site layout. The header and sidebar are selected and enabled by default. If you want to remove or add a section, just click the corresponding button at the top. When you have the sections you want, you can hover over the section to edit it. You can also choose the width of the site if you like. For example, when you click on a heading, you get all the heading options that you can customize.
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You can click on the sidebar to choose whether you want it to be to the right or left of the site and adjust the width. You can click the footer to choose which links you want there, etc. If you decide to add a custom footer, you can insert images, tables, etc. For my example page shown above, I got rid of sidebar and header.
After these two elements are completed, it’s time to start editing and creating pages. Before we dive into this, there is one more concept to understand. On Google Sites, you can create four types of pages: web page, ads, filing cabinet, and list. By default, the web page is used as the home page.
An announcement page is a blog page whose posts are listed in chronological order. The File Cabinet page allows you to upload files and lists them on the page. The list page allows you to create a list of items and display them in a table. You can change the page template at any time by clicking the gear icon on the page and choosing Change Page Template.
Now go back to your home page and click on the little pencil icon at the top to edit the page. You will see a new menu at the top of the page.
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By default, the layout for a new page is set to One Column (Simple). You can change this by clicking on the Layout menu option. The plain versions do not have a header or footer.
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In my example page, I selected two columns (simple). Now you can start adding content to your page! To add a table, click the Table menu item and select the size of the table in terms of rows and columns. To insert something else, select the “Insert” menu item.
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You can insert all sorts of elements like image links, text boxes, HTML fields, calendars, charts, maps, YouTube videos, etc. Since Google sites are owned by Google, they integrate with Google Docs, Sheets, Hangouts and other services Google. In the “Gadgets” section, you will see “Recent Posts”, “Recently Updated Files” and “Recent List Items”.
You can add them to the page only if you have already created the ads page, file cabinet page and list page, respectively. In my example page shown above, these three elements are added to the second column. When working with text, you can click the Format tab to select different styles for headings, etc.
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Please note that if you want to add any CSS, JavaScript or custom HTML to your page, you will need to insert an HTML field. You can view the HTML for each content area on the page, but you can only make minor changes to the CSS and HTML.
Finally, you can create a new page by clicking the New Page button, which is located directly to the left of the Settings button.
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Give your page a name, choose a page template, and then choose a location for your page. You can create a top-level page or place it under another page.
Well, these are the basics of building a simple web page or website using Google Sites Nothing fancy, but very easy to use and learn. It’s also completely free, which is nice. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to leave comments. Enjoy!
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