Create Your Own Website

  1. Log in to your gmail account. Once you have logged in to your gmail, look at the upper right corner. You will see the nine squares icon next to the circle with your initial. Let’s talk about these two. The circle is your current Gmail account that you are logged into. If you click on it, you can change to another Gmail account and then you could toggle between accounts. I do not recommend this. If all you will be doing is email then toggling between the gmails accounts won’t be a problem, but if you intend to use other tools such as docs or sites, your accounts will not be compatible. To prevent this from happening, I use different Web Browsers for different classes. We will talk about this later. Back to creating a Google Website.

  2. Click on the 9 squares icon. From henceforth I will refer to this icon as the Google App Launcher, as they prefer. You notice the myriad of options and apps Google provides for each account, gratis! Some you have already used many times like Google Maps and YouTube. Others are perhaps more mysterious. You can rearrange these icons in that menu to put your favorites on top, but this is tricky. Notice the icon named “Drive.” Google Drive is the counterpart to Microsoft Office Suite. It contains the word processor, spreadsheet, slides, and more. We will return to this.

  3. Back to Google websites. Go down with your cursor scrolling past a myriad of apps, and click on “more from Google.” Scroll to the bottom until you reach a multitude of icons and click on “Sites.” - This is a LONG process just to get to “Sites.” A shorter way would be to type in the address bar of your browser (where the URL goes) sites.google.com - you will get there directly without multiple clicking and scrolling.

  4. You will be welcomed with a greeting.

  5. Start a new site > click on BLANK (the option with the plus sign)

  6. Your website. Name your Site (upper left)

a. Name of your website. I recommend the title of the class you are in with something unique like your name and the school term or year. Something like raygen.aplang2022 - you may use periods (dots) in naming your site.


b. Select a theme - Click on this and choose something you like. There are over 50 themes. The themes will give you a different layout, use different fonts and have different color schemes. I recommend something plain and straightforward, easy to read (you and your students will be spending a lot of time here - go easy on your eyes.)


c. Now you add content.

INSERT

PAGES
THEME