Using Google Sites

 By Morgan Lucas

This is a post intended for this site, as a way to get a feel of using it consistently. Older posts are here.

I do site and user testing, and one particular screener - not sure about the organization - said "Do you use the following sites?".

It listed well known products; Canva, WebFlow, WordPress - and then it listed Google Sites.

I said "Google who?"

Now, I'm familiar with Google Products - YouTube, Gmail, Blogger (Which I use to write my blog), and my personal murdered - I mean, sunset - favorite, Google Podcasts.

And Google Sites was one that has evaded my notice for quite a long time.

There's a small reddit community that touts its praises, and one person keeping the spirit alive on Twitter. But Google Sites seems to have been ignored by the wider website world - and Google itself.

So I decided to try writing one post here.

The Good

It's much easier to customize than Blogger, which has a very LiveJournal style about it. Sites pages have modern interfaces and designs. Though, once you use this, you can see that just about every Google Site uses a similar layout.

There's also a nifty changelog that appears every time you publish your site again.

Google Analytics is much easier to connect to Sites than to Blogger (ID removed).

You can adjust text and information like this; The text and image are in columns!

It's visually interesting, though maybe not to good web design standards. 


Needs Improvement

I do wish it was a little easier to add new pages in a blog post fashion, but I admit that may compromise the ability to customize and relative freedom. I can move this box over here and put an image to the right; It would look haphazard on my Blogger theme.

I can just duplicate the page and adjust it to my leisure with each new blog post.

The ability to import all my blog posts to my site would be nice, but that's not really what this site is intended for. Which is fine.

My only issue is maybe navigation; a list of blog posts in the header is going to look ugly if I continue to use this as a blog HQ. I can add blog posts as a subpage and then add them as a module to the home page as a work around.

Conclusion

I may work on freshening up and transporting old blog posts here if I can get the navigation correct. It's a fine idea.