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Hello, my name is Jeremy. I have set up this site in an effort to help small Apostolic Churches create small and easily updatable websites using Google Pages as a free hosting service. I will also show how to integrate these services with other free services on the web to produce your site as cheaply as possible by taking advantage of your own potential as a webmaster!

First, the basics. In order to take advantage of Google's wonderful package of free resources, you must register with google. If you already have a gmail account, you are all set, otherwise, you should go to GMAIL and register a free email account. (note, some google services will be slow on dial-up. Be patient, and use the reload button if you have to.)

After you are signed into your gmail account, you can begin to design your webpage! go to GOOGLEPAGES and sign in. (If you have cookies enabled on your browser, you should already be signed in after signing into gmail) The Googlepages editor is designed so that you can create a great looking page without any previous experience. While it is limited in it's abilities, Google's What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor is excellent for beginners. If you can use a word processor, you can use Google's WYSIWYG editor.

When you go to googlepages, you will be automatically set up with a page that has a url that reflects your gmail address. (for example http://billybob.googlepages.com, where the email address was billybob@gmail.com. I would suggest that you create a new site in the manager page of the web site builder (see graphic below). This is so no one can pull your gmail address from your URL and spam you. Google will allow you to set up five 100mb pages. (100mb is all that you will need to create a normal site with graphics, even if you get fancy. More than 100mb should not be neccessary unless you begin to add in multimedia, in which case you are already beyond the scope of this tutorial!) This means that you can set up several different sites - for example youth and ladies aux. - and link them up. Each site can consist of more than one page. For an example of how this works, you can see my site Here (Things that Matter to Me) which has several pages. On the same account, I have this site (TTMTM2), which is another site, under a different domain name. However, it is on the same account and has several pages of it's own. This is what you will see when you finish logging in to google pages

For a great tutorial on the basics of creating a Google Page, click on the button below. If you are new to WYSIWYG editors, please go to this tutorial, as Paul Maunders has done an excellent job of creating a tutorial on using the google editor.

If you press the button below, you will find a more advanced tutorial that includes the types of media files that you can upload and instructions on how to upload them.

One advantage of googlepages is the ability to edit the html in each section of the layout. You will find an "edit html" button on the lower right of your screen when you are working in any element of a page. Editing html is how you will insert extra objects such tables or scripts into your page. For free tutorials and gadgets for your web page, see Free Apostolic Site's "Free Tools" page.

Google offers other services as well.

You can

to advertise your site on other sites (you can also get a google search bar for your site here)

You can

to place ads for your site on other sites

You can use Google's URL submission engine to report your website to Google for inclusion in it's search engine

You can use Google Maps to add your church to the list of churches that can be found in the US

You can create an online Blog to share your ideas with the world using Google's Blogger

You can create a forum for your church members to communicate and and share prayers and bible studies using Google's Google Groups function

You can add gadgets to your page by using the "add gadget" button on the bottom right of the page editor screen.

God Bless,

Jeremy