Google Sites in Google Apps

In the past couple of weeks I finally decided to implement an idea that I have had for a while. It's a community website for my suburb that serves as a notice board for the community and also promotion for the suburb itself.

My vague requirements:

- Easy set-up
- Easy Maintenance
- Domain integration
- Easy for user to submit content
- Discussion /Forum

I had been tossing whether to use a blog, or a cms, or a custom built website or a mix of these. I finally decided to go with Google Sites on Google Apps.

The place to start is http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new . This is for a free standard edition. You can already own a domain, or you can buy a new one through this process, which I did. This registration only took a few minutes.

Google Apps comes with its own control panel / dashboard where you manage your users and the apps available to them. The main app which I am going to use is Google Sites. GSites lets any of your domain users easily set-up and maintain their own "wiki-style" website. A Site can be private, or visible only to signed-in domain users, or public for everyone to see.

So what I needed was one main Google site that is available for everyone to see, and make it available at the www. of my domain. This was easily configured from the dashboard. Then I started building the site itself. On paper I already had a structure I wanted to give to my website. So now i just had to implement it as best as I could with Google Sites.

The layout can be customised slightly. It will always have a header and a footer and a navigation column either to the left or to the right. The width of the website can be changed and so can the width of the navigation column. The navigation column can contain configurable menu boxes with links to pages within the site. The fonts and colours of the various bits and pieces can also be customised.

So a google site is made up of pages arranged in a hierarchical fashion, which is also reflected in the user friendly urls. example:

http://www.nsw2759.net/
http://www.nsw2759.net/now/news
http://www.nsw2759.net/now/news/nsw2759netlaunches

Also, a page can be one of a handful of types:

• web page - just a rich html page
  
• dashboard - a page with panels where you can embed gadgets
  
• announcements - where you can post announcements like news, or could be used like a blog
  
• file cabinet - for file attachments
  
• list - for a list of things

I used a mix of the first 3 types. Editing a webpage is simple. You use a rich wysiwyg editor. You can also insert various gadgets on the page. In my case I have an "announcements" gadget which displays announcements from my "news" page, and a google calendar gadget which displays the calendar I created in my same google apps domain.


The other feature that I used throughout the website is the ability to embed a google apps document within a google sites page. In my case I needed quite a number of input forms to gather information from the community. So I created Google Forms which post the collected data into Google Spreadsheets, all in my nsw2759.net google apps domain. It even notifies me by email when someone submits a form. Pretty neat.

Google sites also comes with an auto-generated sitemap, and of course an inbuilt search facility, not to mention versioning of pages wiki style and "recent activity" page.

However, they are still working on an RSS feature and it is still missing some basic customization features such as a custom favicon.

Also, for my discussion/forum requirement: Signed-in domain users have to possibility to comment on any page/article. However I am not going to give a domain user account to every citizen of my suburb (the free google apps is only limited to 50 users, and in any case it is way too heavy for what I need). So for now I settled for a facebook group, which allows users to participate in a discussion board.

So far, I found Google Sites on Google Apps to be very effective for what I wanted to do and certainly recommend it.