How to Use Google Sites - Tutorial for Beginners

hi there jamie keate here today at teachers tech hope you're having a great day today today i want to show you how to use google sites so google sites is available in your google account and it's for free you can create a website so i'm going to go through from scratch starting a new website and showing you all the different things you can do it to it by creating multiple pages adding videos and making should know you how to share it to other people when you're working with it or and then publishing it to the world or to a select group of people so today on teachers tech let's get started with google sites so before we get started here today i just want to mention down below in the description i'll time stamp everything which means all you have to do is click on the little number next to the description and we'll jump to that chapter if you're looking for something specific rather than having to watch the whole video but first of all where do you find

google sites there's a few different ways you can find it the first way i'm going to show you is just to type in google sites i'm already logged into my account you need to be logged into your google account to access it but if i just type in google sites and search and look at the first one it brings me right to google sites when i click on this it brings me to a place where i can start my new google sites i could type in sites. google. com and it will bring me into the same place but remember you do need to be logged in to your google account for you to access this way at this point i could just go ahead and click on blank notice that there's templates too towards the end of this video i'll show you how the templates work it's a great way to save yourself a lot of time in planning but i'm going to start off with the blank ones just so you know all the different points the other way to start a google sites and i'm just going to click on the google apps which is all part of all the different when you're logged in as google you'll see i'm going to go over to my google drive and you can open it right from here so i could right click i write on it and you can see if i go to more and then go down google sites is right here and it will go to creating google sites and i can also do it from new more and you're going to see google sites that way too the one thing i wanted to point out though i like doing this way a lot of times what i'll do is

make a folder here if i'm starting a new google site so i'm just going to call this website and i'll hit create and so i have this new folder and i'm going to go in here create my google sites from within here because i just like to kind of keep it organized in a folder if i put other things into that one area you don't have to do this but it's going to be saved in your google drive i'm just organizing it into a folder so i'm going to go ahead to more google sites and now it's opening up google sites it's giving me my blank site and it's i'm good to go from here

the first thing i like to do after i create my website in a certain area of my drive is to title it because you could have lots of different websites so in this case today this is just an example i'm going to go ahead type example here and notice when i do that it changed down here now this is going to be the file name if i look at it i'm going to go back over to google drive here and here's the website that i just created and i titled and it's in that website folder that i made and it's called example now i can go ahead and change this here so let's say my website today is going to be all about dogs and i will just leave it like this and notice it doesn't change the file name so i have this is going to be what my website's about in the title to the website but it doesn't change this if i go back over here this is still called example so that's the first thing i like to do is getting making sure everything is named correctly before you

get started is there anybody else you're working on this website with so this isn't about publishing it to whoever is viewing it it's about do you have other teachers helping you create this is there a group project that you need everybody collaborating on now to add more people that you've created the original file in your google drive you need to come up to here where it says share with others and you click on this and just like other google documents you can share and they're sharing restrictions so you can see if i click on the share with people settings it will go back editors can publish change permissions and change add new people so do you want them to have those permissions i can add people to this so if i clicked on it i'm adding people and i can send them a message to it i'm going to hit cancel on that one i can also have different links so if i go down here i can change how the links are change it to anybody that drafts anybody in teacher's text can view it if i go to restrict it only people add it to the link so people that i've added to the link can view it but maybe it's within your organization so if you're thinking about maybe kids in a class they'll be able to create a group and they're working on a website together and making sure that you go through these options or would you want it completely public so this is how we would share to be working with other people that's different than the publish button and i'll talk about the publishing more late later when we have our website to give an example when we've added some pages but this is published how we push it to be seen on the web so people can view it from there before we start adding content and more

pages to our website you can choose a theme now it is limited over on the right hand side you can see there's insert and there's pages and themes and this is where we're going to insert our content but under themes currently it's just selected as the simple and there's a color picked right here if i click on a different color you can see this light tone changes to it i can also pick my own color at the end when you hit the bucket and then put the hex number in it to get the exact color you're looking for now you can also pick a font and they could they've limited with the fonts uh these they go well with the page but you are limited uh to the ones that they're given right there now i'm just going to pick a theme to start with i'm going to go with this one down here color and i'm going to pick the slab as my font style so now i can start from this theme and adding pictures and content at any time i can go back and change the themes here too but you don't always have to have themes you can break things down individually and customize it the way you want to okay so before i move on i want to

change the image to this here now there's different ways you can change your images you can click here change image if we go select image right here you can do they have the ones that are already available for you so if you wanted a certain picture or design you can go through and then you just click and hit select and you can see the background change now if i go through i'm going to go back to select image again i just wanted to point out you can go by a url if you had a certain image you knew where it was on the internet and you could put the url there you could search for it in here so if it was dogs i could look for dogs in here do remember only select images that you have confirmed that you have the license to use so making sure that if you're putting images on your website that you have licenses to do that you have your albums these are ones uploaded to my google and there's google drive do you have any of the images in your google drive that you could use now what i'm going to do actually i'm going to close this i'm going to go change image and i'm going to upload the image and the image is from this site right here pixels i'm gonna up i've already downloaded this one but this site you can use them uh they're royalty free to use and so that's why i'm gonna use this site here and i'm gonna go upload and this one it's on my computer already and i'm going to just click and hit open and you can see i have the puppies the golden retriever puppies in the background here and i can change the header type too so maybe it's the opening page and you just want the full page to be image behind i could do cover so now this would be the first page here that i have and then maybe you didn't want that you could go larger banner or you could go to banner which it was before or you could go title only and it will remove the image behind it too so i'm just going to leave it at larger banner for this example here today so i have my image now the next step i want to go down to is the bottom of the page and add a footer at if you hover your mouse down

you'll notice add footer so the footer is going to go across all your pages so it's a horizontal block that if you click add this is where you can add information and it's always going to stay the same with our horizontal top the title part that you can change that on every page you can change the different images but the footer is going to be the same on every page so maybe you might want to put a link to your if i paste you can see i have a link to my website that i could add to it i could highlight it and make sure it's an actual link in here so this could go across all the pages i could also add if i have my social media i could add information so people click on that and it's always going to stay the same so notice when i add these blocks it becomes across the bottom if i want this gone all i have to do is hit the garbage can and it will be gone i can duplicate this section here too and i can change the select the background now it's defaulted because of the theme that i picked but if i go to it and i wanted to maybe have an image in the background i could do it that way so if i go to select image and i'll use one of these pattern ones and you'll see that now i have a different uh it it's different in the background and it makes the adjustment to show the font so you can make adjustments just like that now this is where i'm going to preview the page and i haven't really talked about that before but if i go up you can take a look what things are looking like how it look like on the web so if i click this preview right here it starts to give you an idea that we have our title up here we have our footer down here you can see the link that i have here we can go across and see what it would look like on a phone on a tablet right now it's defaulted to the large screen how it would be on a computer but if i want to go mobile it gives an idea what it would look like and how it adjusts based on the pictures and everything so it will adjust to fit the different devices when you want to get out of this just hit the x and then we're back this and now we're ready to add some content to the page

all right let's say that you've accidentally closed down your tab on this one so if you close it down and you're wondering where to get your google sites back up again it's just saved in that folder right so you can search for it if you've saved in the folder or the title you called it and you just go ahead and click on it again and it will pop right back open and you're ready to work because it saves automatically now i'm just going to make a change to this title i could delete it if i want if i delete i don't have to have the title here but i'm just going to call this dogs here just to stay within my theme and i'm going to highlight this and make it bold i could italicize it if i want i could even make it a link so if i had a website i wanted to go to i could go ahead highlight it put the link in and hit apply and it will take me to that site now the first thing i want to show you how to insert is text now there's a few different ways how to do this you can just go over to insert a text box and then if you click on it it creates a horizontal uh block across your whole website here so i'm just going to say type info in here spell things correctly so i'll just put in info here and you can see how it kind of formats through here now i'm going to do this one more time and a different way to do this would be i could just double click over here if i double click it pops up with this here and it's the same thing of these over here so it's kind of just a shortcut i could just click and i'll do text again and i'll say type info here and i'll just put two now what i can do here is change the size of these blocks so if i decided and i like how they had to have the little grid lines the i could decide to go to here with this one shrink this one over here and decide to move it i can go and grab that handle again and move it up here so i can type in these different text boxes and i can move them around the page depending on how i want because i might decide to add an image into so if i go ahead to the image and i could select an image or upload an image i'm just going to go and we'll use one of these ones that i have downloaded from that site i could drop it up in here so now i have text image in here and i can resize the images too so i could resize if i wanted it smaller you can see

how i did that just by grabbing the handles to it and it's cropping as i do it too so if i go back in it here and i hit the crop i can zoom up move around to a certain part of the image when i get it hit there and then really highlight what i want out of the image too so i can type the information i have over here add my images and i can move these all around i can link the images just like text so if i select the image click the link type the link and hit apply that's going to bring you to a different spot on the website and you can do that with any of the objects that you put in here so that's inserting text and images and you can also put things from google drive in here too and this is used quite a bit if i go back to drive and inside the drive here i can put in entire folders if i want or different things out of here so if i was going to go to let's go miscellaneous here and i have a video and i'm just going to

go at the bottom it says insert after i select it insert so now i have a video from my google drive that would play now the one thing you have to realize if you put something from your google drive that has permissions of only you can see it and you want other people to see it you have to change the permissions inside google drive so if i wanted people to see this video i wouldn't have to go to my google drive and say let people anybody on the web to see it or people inside the organization so anything you put from you from your google drive do remember that too uh on it so that because i might be able to see it when i'm working with it but that's because i have permission but if you're sending it out to a different group our parents and if they're not logged in and don't have account to see it they won't see it so do think about that uh yeah so we can go back to drive if i go back to here let's say if i was going to pick a folder here and insert

i can put an entire folder in and so this works really well because if i'm all i have to do is update the files inside the folder and then it will automatically come here and people will be able to see this now i'm just going to preview this so you can get an idea so if i hit the preview button here and remember i'll be able to see everything because i'm logged in but this is the preview and it gives a glimpse into my folder that i could go if the permissions are right they could click on it and i would never have to update this anything i put in the folder will automatically change so you can add a lot of things from your google drive right through here and you can change the order around quickly here if i grab the handle to move if i wanted this up you just drag it up hope it didn't drag it up that time if i drag it up above and now i've changed the order you can size all these things different if you wanted them to go across different lines so i can as i showed you before i can move these things up to change the order of different things now what i like though is using the layouts provided for me and you can go through and play in certain inserting different things from your google drive and different things but i just want to show you latest on how that can save you a lot of time i'm just going to go ahead and delete the horizontal rows that i already have across just by hitting the garbage can on both of these are

the layouts if you don't see them they might be closed you can see how it opens and closes here now the layouts are great because they kind of give you placeholders to put whatever you want you can notice down of other things you can insert placeholders uh too but these kind of have help you with the design of it so if i know well i want three images across i could click on this one and i'm all ready so it helps me format right across here gives me a place to add text here and here then when i hit the plus i can go ahead and upload select image from drive i could add youtube videos a calendar a map so in this case i'll just add will do my upload that i did before and i i'm just going to put the three different dogs i'm going to go upload to each one and i'll pick a different one and one more here and we'll use this one again like so and i'll just call this dog one whoops jog one here you can see i can just add the text very quickly to each of these here and i could add more text so i could give a quick preview to see what this looks like now and it starts to lay out things very nicely gives me an idea uh just speeds up the process and you can go through and add more rows so if i was going to go through here i could click on it again and it adds another spot down here now you could just add text or do what you want but i find this is a nice way to just really sort out your website when you're adding a different uh when you want to get that look it gives a nice clean look and divides things up very nicely and when i'm designing a lot of times i like to use placeholder so placeholder is down here so if i click on placeholder it just gives a spot that says well i know i want to put something there and when i'm ready i can go through and then maybe put that video and change the size if i need it i can use the grid behind it to stretch it out and get it to exactly the size that i want so maybe it's something that maybe i want to google slides and there are sort of google docs or a youtube video so i'd make it more appropriate size in here i just want to show you a few more things how to insert and it's just

following down on this insert tab at the bottom and you can look how we can have a few different things so something like collapsible text if we click it and all we would have with it so if i put what's below here and then just type something else i'll say this is you can see how it opens up and there's something below it so that's collapsible text there we have a table of contents now with the table of contents what you need is to be putting headers in place so if i was going to put some text and i'll put a text in here and i'll just put title 1 and drop down i need to make this a heading here so if i put another one here and i'll just call this title 2 again you need to make sure that you have this as a heading now if i add my table of contents it automatically picks up these uh titles so they have to be headings when you put them in it won't just pick up normal text you can change it after if you forgot to make them headings you can go back and select it and put it but then you'll be able to jump to different parts of the page where you can break down from these to it so this page isn't very long but that will help you organize some of your pages now the next thing i wanted to show you just moving down this is a great feature is the image carousel so you have to add at least two images and i'll just go grab the ones i already have already we'll grab so i'm gonna grab multiple four here and it will upload these up here and then i'm gonna have a carousel and then i'll show you what that looks like here so we got the two uh going up here and then there's the last one we'll go insert so now it will have these dots at the bottom here and i'm going to hit it in preview here so it gives you any idea what it looks like and we have this little slideshow that they can go through we have this image carousel so again i can go back to this if i wanted to and change the dimensions depending on whatever has the best look in here so i go through and you have some settings in here that if you wanted to update any of these or add more to it so that's the image carousel there's the buttons if you needed to add links in a place to just hop to a different site we have placeholders that i showed you and just a couple other things youtube videos if you were gonna go you can get the url from the from it or you can go ahead and search something so if i was gonna say uh google classroom and i can go ahead and put i'll put this video of mine right through here and i can insert videos just like this and then when you preview it they'll be able to see this one you can insert your google calendars again you got to make sure it's a public if you're sharing it with everybody if you want everybody to see the calendar that you're sharing needs to be with the right permissions on it we have maps and the last thing i just wanted to point out because you can play with all these things to insert is just a google slides a lot of people create nice looking slideshows with their bitmojis put them in and

go from here and you can have a slideshow that gets put in and when we load this so i'll go ahead and preview this again and you can kind of see that we get these slideshows right in here and then they can go full screen right from here and then so if you're putting up more information um on it that they could go through a slideshow it's easy to take your google slide as google sites and curate all your information and give it to them give it to your students or whoever your audience is in a way that makes sense so i'm just going to close out of this again this kind of goes uh over all the different insert things that i've talked about here and i'm just going to go to pages now and show you how easy it is to create some pages but then you're going to do all those same things that i've already showed you on those new pages

the last tab i want to talk about of these three is the pages so we've only had one page i've showed you how to insert everything into it and we picked your theme but pages is how we insert more pages whether it be a whole new page or a link or menu link too now we can do this a few different ways so notice there's always these three little dots here if i click on it we can duplicate a page properties add a sub page so a sub page i'll show you that in a moment but i'm just going to hit the plus down here and we have a couple of things we can add now i could add just a link so if i wanted it to go to maybe a different site and i could give it a title up here so i'll just type it in here and you can see now i would have a link to the website there i can delete these if i want if i go back again i can go back to properties hide from navigation or just delete it like so and it would be gone so now i'm back to only having my one home page but if i want multiple pages here uh we just call this i'm gonna call this dogs2 we can change names after you might not know all the names of pages if you want maybe you're doing it in your subjects area you can see drop down if i wanted to give it a custom path but i'm good with what it is here now i have dogs too so i have home and dogs too i'm going to add another page here and i'm just going to call this dogs 3 on this one just so that you can see all the differences here dogs 3. i'll preview it up top here and we have our home page we have our dogs 2 and our dogs 3 page and i could keep adding more pages i'll close out of this i can customize each of these pages too and i can drag them in different order so i drag them up notice now the order is different the other thing too is i can make it a sub page so actually i'm going to go back and make it dogs 4 page and then i'm going to take it and i don't want it at the top let's say i drag it to the bottom but i could drag it on top and it makes a sub page so you can see how it's indented and it gives me this coming down a drop down so it's a good way to help you again curate your information in clean ways not to get too many links and one place on the page uh you can change where these are you have a different choice if i go up into my settings up here we could change it if we're under navigation here

i could go back and change it to side and what it did was it oh now the navigation is going to be over here and it's still everything works the same i still have my sub page under the one but you can change where you want it so if i hit that little gear again i can change it back to top if i want and you can see if i wanted a color across the top of the menu like this and before it was i think i prefer the transparent so if i go back and change it and i'll go back to transparent and it's like that so all these different pages that i showed you and now you'd go through and insert the information how you'd want on each page and create the website how you want now what do we have left to do well we just have a couple of things to i'll show you where you can add a few things like a logo and a favicon and then i'll show you how to publish it so everything can go to the web before we publish a couple last things i wanted to show you and you can get to it

through the gear setting right up here we've been to this a couple times so if i click on it from settings now i've showed you the navigation one i wanted to point out the brand images so we have a logo if you wanted to upload a certain logo that you have you can go ahead and create it uh create it and then upload it and then it will be placed we also have favicons now favicons are these little images on the tab that pop open here like this is google sites or you can see this is uh google drive here you can have one customized to your website and you go ahead and upload it from this point we also have announcement banner so if you wanted to type something a message to your class or whoever it may be you can make the announcement you could say show banner and click on there and you do want it on all pages or home page open a new tab uh do notice that announcement or certain changes are auto saved and applied the next time you publish your site so those are just a few things i just wanted to mention that google sites

could do now to publish your site so before at the very beginning the video i talked about sharing and i've talked about the published one where it was if we hit published here and we go about it so what do we want our publish your site i'll just leave it all about dogs here you can customize it you can see that the url would be this down here now you can if you you can get your customized google domains i have a different video on that i'll show you how you can if you bought a domain how you could get it to yours if you'd want who can view my site anyone at teachers tech i can manage that if i want it public on the web this is where i would need to change it i can go change a published site would be public now if i make this public anybody can see this with the link remember what i mentioned before any stuff in your google drive or if you haven't shared it right they won't be able to see it you have to make sure those permissions of those files come in different places are there but if i hit done and hit publish now this is going to be a published site and i get this drop down up here i can unpublish it right from here i can go back to my publish settings if i wanted to change who could see it or not every time i make a change to it so if i go ahead and make a change to this i need to hit publish again and then that will be the newest copy if i type the things in and don't make the hit publish it won't change it so i could go ahead and view the publish site and you can see right now i have multiple pages i only put some a little bit information on some but i have uh my different pages i have drop down pages on it that you could go through and customize uh the way you want so since this is a published site now it's not the x i get down here i just can go back to edit it and i can go back and change it and remember you have a few more options here that with reporting a problem or taking a tour for is if you're just looking for some other things around google sites but do check out all the options that you do have for your published site and unpublishing it too so i hope you like this walkthrough of google sites it's a great way to put take your information to curate and send it out for free to as i mentioned to a small group of people or to the whole web let me know what else you're looking to learn in google sites or other google products i do weekly tech videos thanks for watching this week i'll see you next time on teachers tech