Google® Business Solutions All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 4. A Tour of Google Sites

In This Chapter

• Exploring the origins of Google Sites

• Understanding the advantages and drawbacks of Google Sites

• Creating a Google Site

• Changing your site's appearance

Google Sites is a good choice for creating Web pages because it supports several different approaches to the Web. The traditional approach — I create and publish a site; you visit it — is supported. But so are newer approaches.

Google Sites is a tool for creating Web sites that is considered part of Google Apps. Google Sites serves as a content management system (CMS) for creators. That means people separated in space and time can work together on content, both editing and contributing. This is a great strength for Google Sites as a Web-site creation tool; usually, a CMS costs money and takes time and trouble to learn. Google Sites is both free and easy to use.

In addition to serving as a CMS for the site itself, Google Sites lets you create sites that host Google Apps documents such as word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and calendars. All of these documents can be shared. Though other Web sites can host Google Apps documents, the ease with which you can do this is unique to Google Sites.

So Google Sites is a powerful tool. The only drawback some people see to it is the complement of its strengths — as hosted software, both the software itself and your data are in "the cloud," protected only by Google's security and not physically within any company's or organization's ...