My Experience Starting With Google Sites

Yesterday I launched our new web site, www.hankscott.org which gives an overview of our missions work with Wycliffe Bible Translators and JAARS. We will use that web site for posting future prayer updates, newsletters, and family photo albums.

I decided to try out Google Sites as a replacement for our old site which was set up on another site which provided a template-based web service similar to Google Sites. I was getting tired of the limitations of the old site, and paying $9.95 per month for technology which had not been updated in about 6 years. It was becoming increasingly difficult to post updates because the administrative tools on the old site didn't work with Firefox nor did they work in IE8! Now that I have completed the setup of our new site, I see the old site's tools have been updated and they are compatible with both of those browsers. Still I will be glad not to have to pay $10/mo for basic web services which Google provides for free.

Google sites has a lot of limitations when compared with other fully open web tools, but it also has some very nice things that are built in. I didn't want to have to fully develop a web site from scratch, since I have other things to do with my time. So using a forms-based or template-based site like Google Sites is fine for my fairly basic web posting needs. I was able to get a web site up and running with a number of nice features in my spare time over just a few days. It would have taken me ages to develop something from scratch because I don't have a lot of web development experience.

Google makes it very easy to integrate Google Analytics with Google Sites, so I can gather basic usage tracking stats to see if anyone is actually going to the site. This is important because a lot of people on our mailing list only receive the electronic version of our newsletter, and rather than sending it as an attachment, I post it on the web site and then send out a short e-mail with a link to the newsletter page on the web site. This is so that they might get drawn in to other things I have posted which they might find of interest (family photos, more advanced articles about technology for those interested, etc.)

Google also made it easy to use the Google Webmaster tools to generate an XML sitemap which can be submitted to the public Google search engine for crawling. I submitted it a couple of days ago. Thus far the site has not been crawled yet, but I assume it is in the queue.

It's nice that Google Sites also has gadgets which can easily be inserted to link to Picasa where we already had a number of photo albums. And the template we used had a 'Contact Us' form included which when filled out sends an update to a Google Docs spreadsheet. I have flagged that document to send an e-mail alert to my Gmail account when it gets updated. So when someone fills out the Contact Us form and submits it, I get an e-mail letting me know about the update, and then I can look at the spreadsheet in Google Docs to read their comment. That is much better than posting our e-mail address on the site and letting the bots find it. I did put our cell phone numbers up there and links to our Facebook profiles, but as yet I don't think the bots take advantage of those things.

I was able to purchase a domain and link it to my Google site so people can access it with the domain name rather than the longer and somewhat more complicated Google Site name. One limitation I found with this is that the domain name needs to begin with www. That is becoming less and less common these days, but due to Google's design the official name needs to be www.something.xyz rather than just something.xyz. But in my domain I was able to forward requests to hankscott.org to www.hankscott.org. So if people browse by dropping the leading www they will still get to the site. Not a show stopper.

Google sites also lets people who have Google accounts post comments on pages, if I configure the page to have a comments option on it. And if people want RSS updates they can go to our What's New page and subscribe for RSS. I didn't see a way to send e-mail updates through the site though, just RSS. For pages which use a File Folder template (like our Newsletters page) people can subscribe for e-mail updates if files get changed, but I think that only applies if they have a Google account and sign in with it.

One of the shortcomings of Google Sites is that it has a very limited security model for viewers. Either the whole site can be open to the world, or it can be limited to only those with Google accounts, or it can be closed so only I can see it. It cannot (as far as I can tell) have pages which are open to some and restricted to others, at least not to the general public. In our former web site we could have people sign in and create accounts, then we could make certain things available to them, but not to the world. But we didn't use that feature much because I found that a lot of people didn't want to sign in, and therefore were missing a lot of the info that I posted in a more restricted fashion. So I had already switched to posting everything publicly.

With Google Sites I can create a page that is not shown in the navigation. So general users won't stumble across it through browsing the site. But it does show up in the sitemap, so I have decided not to include a sitemap link on our site. Also thus far I have not found a way to restrict those pages from Google crawls. I supposed I could figure out how to edit the XML sitemap which gets submitted to Google for crawling, but that gets updated whenever I change the site, so that's not a good solution either. The other option is to use Meta flags on those pages, which I have not figured out how to do in Google Sites yet either. The site does have a default robots.txt (the most common method to limiting crawler activity) but it cannot be edited, or again I have not found a way to edit it.

Google Sites is not perfect, but it meets my needs and it's free! It integrates well with other Google products, and seems fairly extensible at least for my basic needs. Other people have developed a lot of templates and gadgets for it and I suspect that it will continue to be updated with features at technology grows over time. So for now it looks like a pretty good solution.