Create your home page with Google Sites

Launch your web browser and direct it to http://sites.google.com. To use Google Sites you’ll need to sign up for a Google account. This doesn’t take long: just enter your email address and create a password. If you use other Google services such as Gmail or the online Google Apps you’ll already have a Google account, so you can just log in and get started straightaway. However, it’s worth taking a few minutes to think about the design of your website and the content you want to put on it. To create a website for a tennis club, as we did, first gather photos of club events you might want to use, and check details such as the email address of other club members you might need to collaborate with as you design the site.

The first step is to give the website a name. The name you choose will also be used as part of the address for the website on the internet. Just remember that common names such as Tennis Club will probably already be taken, so you’ll need to think of a more individual name, such as South East Tennis. One of the good things about Google Sites is that it will host your site too: you’ll get 100MB of free storage space on Google’s computer systems to store everything that makes up your site.

You probably won’t want to throw your new site open to the public just yet, so Google Sites allows you to control who has access to the site. You can open it up to ‘Everyone in the world’, or limit access to ‘Only people I specify’. We’ll go with the second option for now, as we’re just finding our way and don’t want to display the website to the public just yet. The next step is to select a ‘theme’ for the website. This is simply a colour scheme that determines the basic look of the pages in the website. We want to keep things simple at first, so let’s just select the ‘default’ theme. Enter the security code at the bottom of the page and then press the Create Site button.

Here’s the home page for our new website (notice the web address in the address bar at the top of the screen: http://sites.google.com/sites/southeasttennis). The page is blank at the moment, but we’ll start to add some content in a moment. First, though, look at some of the other options and controls on the page. The Create New Page button is fairly self-explanatory, and as you create additional pages you can also use the Sitemap option on the left to monitor the structure of the site and the links between pages. The Site Activity options keep track of any changes made on the site, either by you or other people that you allow to collaborate on the site.

Let’s get started. Click on Edit Page to switch into editing mode. It’s now possible to type straight onto the new web pages just as if you were using a word-processor. The line at the top of the page – ­Home Page in this instance – is the page title. You can type anything you want in this line to remind you of what’s on each page, and then hide the title so that people who visit the site can’t see it. The title of each page will be listed in the panel on the left-hand side, so that you can quickly switch from one page to another as you add pages to the website.

The design tools provided by Google Sites aren’t terribly sophisticated, but all the basics are there. You can alter the typeface and size, select a variety of formatting options for headlines and body text, adjust the text alignment or switch between single and double-column page layouts. Use the Insert menu to add pictures to liven up pages, as well as other types of information, such as spreadsheet data, calendars or slideshows created using Google’s popular Picasa photo-editing software. You can even create links to videos that you ­or others ­ have uploaded to Youtube. That’s a great option for showing videos on club or family websites.

If you make a mistake you can undo any changes by using the Ctrl and Z keyboard shortcut (that’s the standard Undo command in Windows). When you’re happy, click the Save button to update the web page. There are several different types of pages to choose from as pages are added to the site: standard text and graphics web pages, Announcement pages for news and messages, and List pages that we’ll use for listing the results of our club’s league matches. The File Cabinet pages allow you to upload document files that other people can download, such as spreadsheets or MP3 music files.

There’s another type of page with a little more flexibility for creating different types of design. A Dashboard page is split into four sections, into which you can insert different types of files and information. A simple use would be to insert a few photos to create a photo gallery, but you can do more complex things as well. Each page section has a Gadgets dropdown menu that allows you to insert special items, such as a weather forecast so that our tennis players can check for rain, news reports, share prices, online chat and messaging features, and many more. These ready-made gadgets are provided by Google, so you don’t need to know anything about computer programming to use them.

Click the Site Settings link in the top right corner of the main editing page. Here you can create a list of people who are also allowed to edit the web pages so that you can parcel out specific tasks or pages to other people. If you want someone to edit pages, you invite them as a ‘collaborator’. If you also want them to have administrative control over the website, you invite them to be an owner (an owner could, for instance, change the web address of the site, as well as simply edit pages). You can also invite people as viewers, who can look at the site but aren’t allowed to make any changes.

If we return to the home page once more we can see that a number of new pages have been added­ – Singles League, Coaching, and so on – and that there are links for each page at the bottom of the home page. An important administrative tool here is the More Actions pulldown menu. If you’ve invited other people to collaborate on the site with you, it’s possible to subscribe to messages about the site so that you are automatically informed if someone else has made any changes, either to the site as a whole or to specific pages. You can also use the Page Settings option to add comments to pages or alter links between pages.