MacMost Now 567: iWeb Alternative: Google Sites

Another alternative to using iWeb and MobileMe hosting is the free Google Sites product. You can create a simple web page or seers of pages and let Google host it for free. There are tons of templates to choose from and the pages are highly customizable. You can even make files available for download.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's take a look at another alternate to iweb: it's Google Sites.
So, in addition to Blogger, Google also has a service called Google Sites. It allows you to create very simple web pages, and put them up for free, using your Google account. 
So, after logging into your or Google or Gmail account, you want to go to site.google.com and it takes you to this page here, where you can create a site by clicking on a button. Now there are tons of templates that you can choose from. You can set up a travel site, you can set up a site for a restaurant, for your soccer team, all sorts of things: and a lot of really cool, different apps that fit into some of these different sites. Now let's set up a sort of a plain one as an example. 
Now you just want to come up with a name for the site, so we'll just do this, and it'll generate a name, here and we can change that. And this will be the URL: site.google.com/sites/MacMostsamplesite. Now I can choose a theme for the site, say I'll just choose the second one here. I can also choose some more options like put a description, and who can see the site: like only the people I choose to or everybody. And then I need to fill in the caption. So in here it's created the sample site. I have controls at the top, and I see the site here at the bottom. And I can create a page, edit the existing page, or there are several more actions that I can do. There's even revisions and all sorts of things. So, right here I can edit the page and it will load the editor and I could change the title, and put some text here, and save it. Now if I want to create a new page, here's something cool I can do. It gives me choices. I can just do a web page with just text and things on it, I can create a mini-blog of announcements, a file cabinet (a place for file storage (you can put photos here), and a list.
So for instance, let's create a file cabinet with a bunch of files: do 'myfiles', and you can see that it will be at site/MacMostsamplesite/myfiles, and I can have that at the top level, or I can put that under the homepage, as well. So, I can choose where it appears. Then I can create the page, and in this case, with a file cabinet page, I can add a file, I can delete files, and various options here. So I'll try adding a file. I'll just choose one: just a sample rtf file, say. Then I can put a description- whatever I want. I'll just leave that blank for now. Go in here and you can see, I've got that. 
Now you can see that Google Sites is a great alternative, creating a quick web site: just putting some files up, some info up that you can point people to.  You don't have as many features as, say, in Blogger or in WordPress; it doesn't seem that you can create a custom domain, for instance. But it is a great, free way to replace a simple iweb page, with a Google Sites page, and more or less, get the same functionality. 
Hope you found this useful. Til next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
Want more video tutorials? Just go to MacMost.com and click on the videos link at the top of the page, and then you can view all the hundreds of MacMost videos by category.

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 567: iWeb Alternative: Google Sites”

forkboy1965

14 years ago

Thanks for posting this. I wasn't aware Google offered this service and I think it might be the perfect thing for a project I want to put together.

I was thinking about using iWeb, but with it's pending disappearance...

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 567: iWeb Alternative: Google Sites

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 567: iWeb Alternative: Google Sites”

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