Free Google Website
How to build a Free Google Website
Google has started offering free web hosting. This website is built using the Free Google Sites website.
First off you must have a Google Gmail account.
While I was signed into my Gmail was researching Free Web Hosting. I found several Free web hosts and I signed up for two. They both said you will get a response in two business days after you join our forum. I do not quite understand what that is about. I just wanted to start playing with a free website to put some pages up. Actually I had been paying $100 per year for a website that I was posting shipping information on for my eBay customers. I was looking for a cheaper alternative.
Anyway I stumbled onto an article about a Google Free Web Site. I did a little bit more digging. Then when I did a search for "Google Web Hosting" on Google a Google Sites web page opened up. I went ahead and built a test page and edited the page and saved it. Then I built another page and edited that one also. I linked them together, the link interface is really easy. Maybe I am just getting a little more link savvy.
Google Page Creator--Now Google Sites
The Google Sites interface to start your "web page" design is also very simple and easy to use.
The website used my Google email address in the website address but it starts with sites.google.com. Here is the first website I built.
http://sites.google.com/site/zbikenut/
I found this interesting and wondered if I could rename it. I fumbled around and no such luck. At this time Google will let you have 5 different website names including your first unchangeable one.
You Get Five Free Google Web Sites
After I built my first couple of pages on Zbikenut I was searching around and found that I could build more free sites. All of your website names will end in sites.google.com.
Depending on what you want to do this is a very simple way to build a web site. In less than thirty minutes you can easily put a couple of pages up. If you are familiar with a basic word processor the interface is very simple and easy to navigate.
Build a Free Google Web Site
For Beginning Web site classes this is awesome. I did not think these pages would rank highly on the search engines but I was wrong. I have built several pages in my free Google web sites that are ranking well for some keywords. Check out my primer on How to get your website into the Google index. This has been a fun experiment.
2 months later--My zbikenut website is coming along. 45 of the 52 pages in the website are in the Google search index.
No Advertizing in Your Web Site
No advertizing is jammed down your throat when you build a Free Google Web Site. Most Free websites will put a banner ad at the top or the bottom of your page or both. You can put your own affiliate ads on your site easily. If you check the top and bottom of this page you will see the Google Adwords that I have put up. When these ads are clicked on I get a small stipend from Google.
Google no longer allows you to put Google adsense on your sites.google.com web pages. If you put adsense on them before the stopped allowing it then you can keep the ads.