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How to Use Google Sites - Free Website Builder
2K views
Jun 10, 2024
In this video, you'll learn how to use Google Sites, a free website builder offered by Google. The tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to creating a website using Google Sites, covering topics such as choosing a template, adding and organizing content, customizing the design and layout, and publishing your site. You'll also discover how to integrate other Google Workspace tools like Google Drive, Google Forms, and Google Maps into your site. By the end of the video, you'll be equipped with the skills to build your own professional-looking website using Google Sites, without needing any coding knowledge.
View Video Transcript
0:00
Let me show you a really simple way to create a free website
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We're going to use Google Sites here, which is a free app from Google, and it's available on your Google account
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Everyone has access to this, so you could do this for personal websites, you could do this for work, website, school websites
0:14
I'll show you the entire process step by step. Okay, to access Google Sites, all you have to do is go to Sites
0:20
.goug disappoint. Now, they recently made some changes to Google sites, so I'll cover that in this video as well
0:29
Now once you jump into the website here, all you have to do is go down here and press the plus sign to create a website
0:35
or you could click this icon here. This allows you to choose from pre-made template
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So if you find one here that kind of fits what you're trying to do, these are a little bit easier to get started with because someone's already created the design for you
0:48
So look through some of these templates. In this case, I'm just going to show you with the plus sign
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how to create a website completely from scratch and it is fully customizable. So let's go ahead and click this
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Now the very first step is, typically you want to go ahead and name your site over here. So click on top, type in a name
1:03
So this will be saved to your Google Drive. And as you could see, it also appears over here
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What you could do, you could also add a logo. So if you have a business, for example, and you
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already have a logo, go ahead and click here to add a logo over here. And you could go
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ahead and upload the logo from here, but this is completely optional. You could just go
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ahead and name the site whatever you want over here and you'll pull the name right over
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here. And this is editable as well. So here's the layout of your website. Right on top, you have this header right here
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So this is going to be the big title for your website. So you could name this whatever you want
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but this is the first thing people typically see is this big text over here. Anytime you type in
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any text like this is going to give you this menu bar where you could go ahead and change all kinds of
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different things. So you could go ahead and change the font for example. You could change the font style
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font size. All those are available here. Next, you may want to change the background. So if you click right over here
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when you have these type of backgrounds, it's going to let you choose all kinds of different styles
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So you could kind of change how this looks entirely. So you could see all these different kind of template options to change this top banner here
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And then if you want to change the image that is in the background right over here, you could go ahead and upload your own image as well
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So I could upload an image just like this and it's going to become the new background
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And if you were going to share this website publicly, make sure you just don't pull images from Google because you're going to have copyright issues
2:28
So there is a platform. that I recommend is called Invato Elements. This one has photos, for example. These are stock photos
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and it has millions of millions of different stock photos here that you could choose from
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and it has a bunch of different filters to help with your search Basically you paying for the permission to use any photo that you want from here You getting a license basically to use it So that is a copyright issue
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You can't just pull any image to any website. So find a platform like this or look up copyright free images or royalty free images to find a platform like this
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But I'll include this one in the description. Okay, the next thing you want to do is once you get your top banner rights
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is you want to add another content block. So you need to add something in the second section of your website
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And if you go to the insert section, they have these different content blocks that make it really easy to design your web page
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So this one has an image and then text to the right. This one has two images and text on the bottom
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So if I click this one, it's going to add this section for me. Now, if you press the plus sign
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you could upload images from your computer here. You could select images from your Google Drive as well
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So if you have images saved to your Google Drive, You could pull it from here. You could also add a YouTube link from here too. So you could directly
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turn this into a video. All you have to do is press YouTube, type in a link. So I have this video
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for example, how to use Google Drive. So I could go ahead and select this and then this is going to be
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added like this and it's going to pull the thumbnail from YouTube here as well. And then I could
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type in the header and then right here I could give it a little bit of description. And this is
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going to be your first section over here. If you want to add another section, all you have to do
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do is go over here and click and it's going to add it right to the bottom of the previous section
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Now if you want to remove a section, all you have to do is click that section and press delete
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and it's going to remove that entire section. Now besides these content blocks, you could also
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add things like this. So image carousel, for example, if I click on it, it's going to let me
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insert bunch of images here. I need at least two. Let me show you what that looks like
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I added four over here and if I insert them, they basically turn it
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into a carousel where you could see these little dots. So it's going to go from one image to another image when someone is previewing this
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And then I could go ahead and place this somewhere where it makes sense for this page
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So all I need to do is drag it and place it somewhere in the middle. You could see this kind of snaps into place
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So this looks like the center of the page. And this is going to become the little carousel
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where people could go between these different images. That's available over here
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And you also have different things like dividers. So if you click on a divider, it's going to be a divider. click on a divider, it's going to create a little separation here. You'll also have things like
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buttons here. So if you want to send someone to a specific website, you could type in the website
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URL here and the name and press insert and it's going to look just like this. And then if you want to
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move this this alignment just centers it in this box but you could just move it like this And you could also move it to a different section of the website too So you could actually move it up and bring it over here and it going to put it over here
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Now, if you hover over here, you also could add a footer section. So if you click this, it's going to let you put a footer section
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So if you want to do a copyright and the name of your company, for example, you could go ahead and do that
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And that's going to appear down here on the footer. And you could also change what the footer looks
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like. So if you select this section, you'll get this little icon over here. If you
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selected, you could actually go ahead and upload an image as a background or you could
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choose a style like this where you change the color of the background. If you don't
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like any of these colors that is choosing, by the way, you just have to go to theme and change your theme. So the themes have pre-designed colors here. But if
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you want to change any of them, so if I want to change that red for example to
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something more gray, I could choose gray. and you can see it's turning that section into gray
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In this case, I'm going to just go ahead and make it black here so it looks completely different than the rest of my webpage
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So this is going to allow you to create a web page again, inserting all these kind of different elements here to kind of create your web page
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You could always use templates here to make the design a little bit easier
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If you go to this pages section too, what you could do is you could add other pages
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So right now we only have one page, but if we create a new page, let's say this is about a
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Us page. I could type that in, press done. And now I have a brand new page. It still pulls the banner
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from the other page just to make your website consistent. And it creates a little menu on top
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So you have your home page now and you have your About page and it's created that text for us
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And if I change the background on this page, it's going to pull a whole new background over here
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In this case, I'm going to go ahead and reset it. And if I reset it, it's going to pull the original
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image we had. So the homepage has the image be uploaded. The About page has the default image over here
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and I could create all the different section of this page. All I have to do is go to insert here
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and then I have all these different options that I could just pull into this section
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I could even pull things from Google Docs and Google Slides and Google Sheets as well
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to kind of create the rest of this page. And you could keep making more pages here
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If you just press the plus sign here, you could go ahead and create more pages. And you also have other options of adding a whole new menu section too
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to add different sections like this to your menu on top. Now, a couple of things I could do if I'm happy
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with this. I could go ahead and click this plus icon right here with the person. That's going to
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allow me to share it with other people. I just have to invite them here and they could make
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revisions to it. I also could press this right here to go ahead and just kind of preview it here
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full screen and just kind of see what I need to change here to make sure all these images look good and things like that So this does need a little bit of work These images don quite fit So that a good way to find out if you need to make any changes And when you happy what you could do is press publish right over here
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And this is going to allow you to create a website at sites. Google.com and then the rest of the website is where the name is going to go
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And it's going to say sites. Google.com slash view slash whatever you put at the end here
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That's going to become the URL here that you could copy and paste. For more advanced users, you could
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You could also create your own domain here, which you got to buy
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And then that's going to let you link this to not just sites.govogul.com
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but whatever your website name is. And then once you have something that no one else has, this has to be a unique URL like this
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You could go ahead and press publish. Now, once your website is published, you get this link right over here
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So you could copy the link of this website. And this is the link that is created for us
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And you could go ahead and copy this link. And then if you share that with anyone
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as your website and they go to that link, they're gonna come exactly to the website we just created
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It's gonna have the menu on top, the name of the website. Obviously, the design here needs a lot of help
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but you have everything that you need right here to go ahead and create a design that actually looks pretty good
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And remember on the homepage, if we go back, we could just go ahead and create a new site
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from those templates that I showed you in the beginning of the video. So let's say we're creating something relating to a specific project
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and we want to make a website, about it, we just go ahead and start with that template to make the designing a whole lot easier
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As you could see over here, we got a much nicer menu. Our header looks a lot nicer here, our banner
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on top. The sections have a really nice headline here with different sections. And all we have
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to do, just like before click to add new images that we could get from in bottle elements or
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anything on your computer. Change the text over here and it has a button right here. All the colors
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are nice. The footer is nice. So all you have to do is simple. make some changes over here. And with these, it has different pages already made for you too
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So I could go to the history page, for example, I make changes over here. I could go to the
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Teams page and make changes over here. And then when I'm happy, go ahead and publish that
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Go ahead and name your website, press publish. And when people go to that website, this is what it
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looks like. So it's going to have different menus here on the left side that people could jump into
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It looks great on mobile devices too. You can go ahead and preview that over here in the preview
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window, this is what it looks like on mobile devices, and this is what it looks like on tablets as well
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I also have a deep dive tutorial on how to use Google Drive properly, Google Docs, Google Sheets
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all the Google products, even the AI tool Google Gemini. So I'll link those below in the
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description of this video. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you on the next video
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