Google Sites Intranet News Gadget & Most Recent Announcements Feed

Display news posts, embed recent announcements and manage blog articles for Google Sites.

What is a Google Sites News Gadget?

A Google Sites news gadget sorts, filters and showcases curated announcements to your audience using embed code. The code is linked to Google Sheets so content managers, and in the case of intranet usage internal communications teams, can easily maintain a database of news.

For Google Sites intranet use

Companies using Google Workspace and Google Sites for intranet often have announcements, updates and alerts that need to be broadcast. New Google Sites doesn't have an announcements page type template or a recent posts gadget. Theoretically, internal comms teams can insert links, images and text blocks right onto the Google Sites intranet homepage, but it's clunky.

Moreover, it's often the case that announcements are coming from different sources and then need to be disseminated onto department pages and team sites. A centralized database in Google Sheets and front-end code can create a consistent and powerful tool within the company intranet.

Sometimes teams like to maintain blogs and a variety of articles for instructions, policies and critical operations updates. A Google Sites recent news gadget pushes this information to the fore, instead of buried in nested subpages. Get a real-time dynamic news feed for admins to post news and supporting automatic archiving of old posts.

Hosting Google Sites News Articles

There are two options for hosting your full news articles so that you take full advantage of Google Workspace, AI, search and secure control over your company data. It's important to weigh the benefits with each system in your news location and format.

Google Drive & Docs

You can create a shared drive and a folder structure to allow contributors to write and publish articles using Google Docs. Within Docs, users have the full word processor at their disposal to add media, tabs, cover images, tables, smartchips and more. This is a very organized approach that connects easily to the Google Sites intranet. 

In addition, because your articles are located in Google Drive, they are able to serve as data stores and available in Google Cloud Search from your Google Site. You don't need a third party service or even a Cloud project to get your content management off the ground. Sharing and security are already guaranteed in these baseline Google Workspace applications.

If you are migrating from SharePoint to Google Sites, you can convert SharePoint news pages into files you upload to Google Drive.

Google Sites

You can create pages in Google Sites formatted for news articles. If they are in your Google Site, you can use the standard Google Sites search engine to find keywords within your content. Google Sites is easy to use for news type pages because its drag and drop. You can easily create full webpages, customizing them with images, slideshows, videos and gadgets. Departments can build and organize subpages, using a menu structure to facilitate navigation. In this way your intranet users never leave the site, so it's all centralized and hosted in your Google Sites hub.

Managing Your Google Sites News Database

It's actually quite easier than it sounds because there is no complex CMS to deal with, just a standard Google Sheet. Think of each row as a news item and each column as a data point to maybe display through your recent announcements Google Sites page. Below is a sample of a Google Sheet used for news in Google Sites. Keep in mind there's a lot of room for customization. You can choose more or less information shown on the front end as well as within this database.

How to Get Started

There are many types of news widgets available and customizations that can be made. Discuss your requirements with a Google Sites intranet developer and collaborate.