What You Should Know before You Start your Google site

Before you can use Google Sites, you must first have a Google Account or Google Apps account. A Google Account gives you access to a whole bunch of other free Google online services, such as Google Calendar (http://calendar.google.com), where you can track your appointments and events, Blogger (www.blogger.com), which lets you create your own blog, Picasa Web Albums (www.picasa.com), where you can share your photos online, and Google Docs (http://docs.google.com). If you don’t have an account, blog shows you how to sign up.

Like many other services offered by Google, Sites is a perpetual beta. This means that the clever Google engineers are always improving the way Sites works by adding new features and changing ones that aren’t as helpful. If the screen looks somewhat different from the figures that you see in this blog, it’s okay. The same basic idea should still apply.

To help you understand all that Google Sites has to offer, let us introduce you to three key definitions: Web pages, wikis, and file sharing.

Web pages

A Web page is a file that can be viewed by others in a Web browser. A page can include written text, images, links to other pages, videos, and so on. One way you can use Google Sites is to create a Web page with information you want to share with the world.

In addition to helping you include your text and images, Google Sites gives you access to hundreds of gadgets that you can add to your page. Gadgets are like mini Web pages that show specific information, such as weather, news headlines, calendar events, videos, communication tools, and more.

Wikis:

A wiki is a Web page that anyone can add to or edit. Wiki is a Hawaiian word that means quick, and wiki sites are unique because they can be created, edited, and saved very quickly from within your Web browser. They’re also very helpful because every member of your group or team needs to go to only one place to find the latest information.

Wikis are becoming more and more popular as companies, organizations, teams, and families work to share information and learn the unique things that people know. In any workplace, employees generally have more collective knowledge about how a company operates than the human resources director or company president. By using a wiki, all employees can share their knowledge with everyone else. The human resources team can then edit and organize it all.

How does a wiki work in Google Sites? Everyone who has the ability to edit a site will see the Create New Page and Edit Page buttons at the top of the page. When anyone in your group clicks the Edit Page button, they can begin making changes to the page by adding a graphic or paragraph. When they are done, all they have to do is click the Save button at the top and the page updates instantly.

File sharing:

A very important feature that goes hand in hand with wikis is the ability to keep your team’s files in a central location. File sharing lets members of your team upload any type of file, such as a presentation or video, so everyone else can find it later. When you upload a file, you send it from your computer to a Web site. Then other people can download the file by saving it from the Web site to their computer.

Google Sites makes it easy to share files using the File Sharing page template, as shown in Figure 1-2. Similar to a editing a wiki page, you add and delete files by clicking the buttons that appear on a File Cabinet page. Additionally, Google Sites keeps track of multiple versions of your files, so if someone makes a change to a file and uploads the new one, you see both the new version and the old one.