Create Free Website Using Google Sites: Part III - The Home Page

"When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web.... Now even my cat has its own page."

    Bill Clinton, announcement of Next Generation Internet initiative, 1996


After you have made the appropriate selections and clicked on the Create Site Button, the chances are that your website will be created with the settings you have just made. Once the site has been created you will be shown the page (referred to as the Home page) for your website. This is the landing page for any visitor who is opening up your website.

The look and feel depends on the selections you have made. The Name of the Site (that you provided) goes in the header section of the page and below that is the description for your site that you added on the earlier page. If you did not provide any description earlier, do not worry for now. You can provide is when you want. We will see how.

The Home Page

The page that gets displayed to you after you click the “Create Site” button is the landing page for your website. The landing page for a website is generally the home page and it should be created with great caution as this page, in most of the cases, is the first page that a visitor gets to see when she/he arrives at your website.

The content and looks of the page depend on what settings have you specified during creation of the website. Depending on the selections -
1. If a Theme was specified -


2. If only a Template was specified - Depending on the template selected, the page will have a different look.


Note that the Theme has a higher precedence over the Template and during this tutorial series I will be discussing creating website with a theme selected.

The different sections in the current browser window for the Theme based Home Page are as under -
1. At the top Right side are the controls that can be used to manage the website.
2. Below those buttons, is the page for your website. In most cases, you will be displayed the home page for your website that you can customize to suite your requirements.

Now that the Home Page is available, the Next step is to customize this page. In case you have a template that is in effect, you will be taken to the page from where you will have to customize the different gadgets available. I will be discussing with a normal, theme based website. The Theme based website will give you a better idea of the things that are happening.

Customizing the Home Page
1. Click on the Edit Page button, available at the top right.
If you are not happy with the text "Home" on the page, you can change that to anything more meaningful and relevant. Then you can type out the content on the Home Page. For editing Google Sites displays you a full fledged editor using which you can format the text and perform most of the tasks that you intend to during editing of the document/page

The Editor provided with Google sites is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Editor and most of the functionality is similar to that of your favorite word processing application.

So what we have to do on this page right now is to type down the content on the main / home page and then apply the formatting to the different sections as needed.

Once you are done with the editing and formatting, click on the Save button at the to right hand corner of the browser window. This will make the changes permanent.

If you are interested to view how your website looks like to its visitors, you can select the “Preview As Viewer” option in the “More Actions” list. You can access the “More Actions” list by clicking the more actions button on the top right of the browser window.

As of now, do not bother about the sidebar and other links. They will be placed as we proceed along with the tutorial.

Try this out. In the next post I will be discussing how to manage your website - Creating additional pages and putting up the Photos, Links and other stuff that you would like to add more glitz to your website.

I welcome your feedback as always.

Cheers,


0 comments :

Post a Comment

Spread the Word


Followers