Digital Maestro March 28, 2016 | Page 3

Creating A Site From A Template Google Sites is a free web page content creation and publishing tool from Google. To create a site all you need is a free Google account, which you can get by creating a gmail account. Google Sites has some templates which we can use to quickly create a web site in minutes. Maybe not minutes, but it’s very quick and easy. There are several advantages to creating sites with Google. The most important advantage is that you don’t need to know any HTML, CSS, Javascript or other markup language to develop a site. If you have basic word processing skills, then you have the necessary skills to begin building a web site. Other advantages include the close integration with all the other Google apps and services like Calendar, Drive and YouTube. This means we can easily share a calendar on our site, share files from our drive and display videos from YouTube on any of our pages. Placing these elements on our page is as easy as inserting the item we want and Google sites takes care of making sure it works well. Creating A Site From A Template In this lesson we will begin building a basic site using one of the built in templates. To begin, log into your Google account. Regardless of where you login to Google, you will find the apps launcher in the upper right hand side. Click on the apps launcher and look for Google Sites. In this example I have the Sites app close to my launch button. You can arrange the apps in the launcher so they are convenient to access. If you aren’t sure how to do this, read my post on arranging apps in the apps launcher. Click on the sites app. If you don’t see the sites app in the launch bar, type “sites.google.com” in your browser’s address bar. www.digitalmaestro.org 1