Create a Google Site [new]
Start by going to Google Sites, and sign in using your Google account.
Click the "New Google Sites" link in the bottom left.
There is a nice interactive tutorial, but I'll document it here. The tutorial allows you to drag it out of the way.
Click the "plus in a circle" icon.
Click "Untitled Site" in the top left, and enter the site name.
Click "Your page title", and title the main page. I used the site name!
In the bottom-left of the page-title header, click "Header Type". You have your choice of:
* Large Banner
* Banner
* Title only
I was going to choose "Title only", but with a banner you can also select a picture from these sources:
* Gallery
* Upload
* By URL
* Search
* Your albums
* Google Drive
"Search" seemed interesting, besides Google Image Search it can use images from Life magazine. The image I used came from Life magazine, after searching for "Computer". I ended up keeping the image, and deleting the text box. You can delete that by selecting the box, and then clicking the trash can icon.
Google automatically applied a "readability adjustment", which darkened the image to make overlay text more readable. To turn that off, click the icon in the bottom right to toggle it.
By double-clicking anywhere on the page, a round menu appears with the option to add common page elements:
"Text" creates a full-width text box. You can resize the width by dragging the blue dots:
"Images" provides the same options available for header pictures.
"Upload" brings you right to the "Image Upload" option.
"URL" will embed content from the web page you specify. This is similar to the sharing you can do in other social networking applications. Some examples I tried:
* Google Sites
* Reddit post
* Youtube
In each case, a title, image/video, and description were included. These can be independently disabled. Usually the image was too large, and I disabled it.
The menu in the top-right allows undo and redo, which is necessary when it's so easy to delete any tile.
The preview option shows the page as it will be displayed. The preview has a menu to show previews for table and mobile.
You can add editors, to grant permission to other Google accounts to modify the page:
When the page is ready to go, click "Publish":
Type in "site location", the word or phrase to use in the URL of the direct link to this page.
After publishing, you have some options:
* Change the site location
* Unpublish
* View the currently published site, instead of the edited site
The right column of the editor provides options to change the page theme. You get your choice of 6 themes, 3 fonts, and 5 colors!
The right column also has an option to create a new page, rename existing pages, and change navigation settings.
You can see the results of my testing at Axus Dev 2