- Introducing Google Sites
- Creating, Formatting, and Customizing a Web Site
- Choose a Page Type
- Manage Pages Within a Site
- Embedding Documents, Gadgets, and Media in a Site
- Sharing, Publishing, and Protecting a Site
- Using Sites to Manage Your Class
- Gadget Gallery and Development
- Passing the Google Sites Exam
Creating, Formatting, and Customizing a Web Site
To create a site you'll click "Create new site" within the Google Sites application. You can base your site on a blank site or browse for a template to build your site on. It's a good idea to define the category where the site exists within your school; for example, math, science, or rocket club.
There can be lots of sites within one category; categories just help organize sites and helps browsers find popular sites within your school and within the defined categories.
Themes are the easiest method to customize your site because a theme provides all the pretty colors, predefined artwork, and different layouts. You can choose from 50 different themes and then, once the site is created, you can continue to edit the specifics, such as the color or layout, to your heart's desire.
Simple, direct tabs, such as "Edit page" and "More actions" make it look like the site control is a snap, but there are lots of choices from within each menu. Most of the formatting of sites you'll find through "More actions" and then choosing "Manage site." With this choice, you'll see all options for the entire site, not just the individual page, for editing the site.
A gotcha in Google Sites is that once you create a site, you cannot change the specific URL of this site. Google Apps Administrators can, however, create web address mappings to make site addresses easier to remember and more palatable for schools. Through the Google Apps Suite control panel, the administrator can edit the sites within the school domain and create web address maps.
This is also the part of Google Sites where you can, if you need to, create URL forwarding, so sites.google.com/a/yourcentralschool.org/mainsite can be snappier as http://www.yourcentralschool.org.