Google Sites Tutorial

What is Google Sites and What is it Good For

• • Easy to edit website authoring from any computer

  • Has good search capabilities within a website

  • Cloud based

  • Google Sites is not Google Docs, which are documents that can editted by multiple people at once.

Example Sites

• • Class website. MAE3

  • Restricted Site: MAE3 Logistics

  • Student Project Pages: MAE156B Projects and MAE3 Robots

  • Resources Page: Design Resources

Decisions to Make Before You Begin

• • How many websites?

    • All webpages within a site share the same sidebar and horizontal top bar

    • Searching within a single site is easy

    • In general a single site is easier to manage

  • Website name

Getting Started and Help Center

• • The Google Sites Help Center is a good way to start

Editing Tips

• Remember to hit save

• Clear Formatting when things look messed up: Format => Clear Formatting

• Use Format => Headings if you want organization with a Table of Contents.

Adding Links

• Adding links in your webpage is easy, but the default is confusing.

• In edit mode highlight some text => click icon of a chain link

  • The default assumes that you want to link to another page within your webpage

  • If you want to link to an external webpage, select web address, then paste in the desired URL.

Navigation

• • Horizontal bar vs Sidebar

    • The Horizontal top bar is good for a small number of items.

    • The sidebar is better when you have along list, especially since subpages can be expanded or collapsed

  • Sidebar navigation: Alphabetic vs Manual Control

    • Automatic site layout is the easiest when you have a large number of links, but it is restricted to alphabetical sorted list only. Use:

    • Setting Wheel => Edit Site Layout => click on sidebar area => Select Automatic organize my navigation

Uploading Existing Material

Cutting and pasting text usually works fine. If the formatting is messed up try:

• Web browser menu => Edit => Paste and Match Style (or paste as text).

Cutting and pasting images may look like it works, but sometimes the images disappear when one logs out.

• One option is to insert images one at a time. Insert => Images => Upload Files

• Or ane can import a pdf or word file into Google Docs, and then cut and paste frp, the google docs. This usually works pretty well.

Google Tables

Simple tables can be inserted with the Table menu, but borders, merged cells, or other more advanced features one needs to edit with html. See:

http://www.steegle.com/websites/google-sites-howtos/advanced-tables

HTML Basics

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_primary.asp

http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_tables

Photo Albums

Google Web Albums

https://picasaweb.google.com/home

http://support.google.com/picasa/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66969