Instructions on creating a Google site for ministry groups

1. DO NOT EDIT THIS PAGE!!!! Your page is found under pages.
2. For the time being, lets start with some uniformity. This home page serves as the template, and the pages are available to start editing for your group's ministry (you can find them in the right hand column under the tab PAGES).
   • In the upper left corner, the logo is fixed.
   • Next to it the Site name will remain blank, as the logo takes care of this.
   • Replace "[Ministry Title]" with the ministry's name.
   • For now, keep the cloud background, it was the closest I could get without overhauling some stuff to make it somehow blend with the parish main site.
   • The body of the page is yours to set up how you think it will best communicate with the group.
   • The footer remains at the bottom of the page in this format to allow users who go to any page to find their way back easily and quickly; leave it as is.
3. Like many website services now, Google Sites has gone to ribbons; everything will need to fit in a ribbon. This will help when individuals open the site on mobile devices or tablets.
4. You can use the tools on the right hand side of the page. There are many to choose from. As a suggestion, it is good to judiciously use dividers to separate sections on a page.
5. Speaking of the page, until there is presented to the webmaster a real and absolute need, the ministries are only permitted to use this one page. There is an option for subpages; however, the point of this all is to ease communication with individuals. It is not about creating our own little fiefdoms. Each ministry should be able to, with the proper use of sections, be able to efficiently convey their mission on one page, remembering that the page is nearly infinitely long.

As conditions of accepting this page and the responsibility to maintain it:

• You will not promote anything that is contrary or contradictory to the teaching of the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church.
  • If something is brought up as a conflict and substantiated, you will take down the disputed material immediately; it may not be put back up without permission from a theological authority.
• The information contained on the page will be maintained and current.
• You will not make changes or modifications to any other page except your own, including this one.
• If any changes are made to these instructions, an email will be sent out notifying you of the new procedures and regulations.
• Images:
  • Since we are liable for any lawsuits of stolen or misappropriated images, make sure that any image you use on these pages or anywhere in the name of the church is for open/free use. If you do not understand this term, do not use any images without first talking to Fr. Brashears.

I suggest using Pixabay.com as it is a site dedicate to open/free use images.

• Do not just google search and take one of those images; most of those images are protected, opening us up for a potential lawsuit. And given the tools of the internet, it is very easy for law firms to find such abuses and to go after the violators. If the parish gets sued, you are responsible for the lawsuit payout and any legal fees.

Editing Guide and Cheat Sheet

Google Sites login:

https://sites.google.com/new

*Make sure that you are logged out of ALL OTHER Google accounts (personal, work, etc.) before logging in with your St. Eugene ministry account. Closing a tab will not log you out of your current account.

General Google Sites editing guidelines:

https://sites.google.com/steugenes.org/ministries/home

The basics:

• The left section is where your page will be shown. The right side is where your tools for editing are found. There are 3 sections at the top right - INSERT, PAGE, and THEMES. Do not worry about themes. The PAGE section is where all the ministry pages are located and you will need to click on your page to edit it. The INSERT section is where the text tool, image tool, etc. are found.

• DO NOT EDIT ANOTHER MINISTRY’S PAGE. Make sure that you’re on your own page before you start editing.

• Fr. Brashears suggested a site called Pixabay.com as a resource if you need to find suitable images for your page. They have over 1.5 million photos, clipart, etc. so hopefully there’s one to suit your needs. DO NOT JUST GET AN IMAGE FROM SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS!

• If you want to use your own personal images and they are located on the computer that you’re working from, as long as they are appropriate for the site, you can upload them by clicking the image tool and using the upload feature to upload them to your ministry account’s Google Drive. If you have an image on your phone, you can e-mail the photo to your ministry e-mail address and, from the e-mail, you can download it to the ministry account’s Google Drive. It should then be an option to choose that from the image tool.

• Be liberal with your use of dividers, white space, and images on your page. It’s never good to just have a wall of text for your visitors. Break it up and make it aesthetically pleasing to the eye! Don’t think that you are limited in space for your page and content. There is no vertical limit for your page, so use as much space as needed.

• If you have any confusion about how some of the tools work, feel free to experiment with them using the demo page. Once you are familiar/comfortable with the tool(s), you can then implement them onto your page.

Publishing:

• We are still discussing the workflow for publishing edits, but we may be leaning towards a “publish once a week” approach for the ministry pages. Currently, ministry leaders do not have the option to publish their edits themselves. We are doing this so that one of the web team members can look over the edits as a second set of eyes to make sure everything looks good and then we will publish them all at the same time. We may choose, for example, Sunday night or Monday morning as the publish time. We think that this is a good compromise between allowing the leaders the entire work week to make any edits to their page as things come up and. the web team potentially having to make multiple publish requests from multiple ministries every day. That could get overwhelming and out of hand pretty quickly.

Video tutorials for using various resources:

https://www.steugenes.org/engage

*The end of the 2nd videos covers the basics about using Google Sites. Please watch this short section (less than 10 minutes long) to get an introduction to editing and using your ministry page.

Contact for questions:

webmaster@steugenes.org