Creating a Small Business Website Part 1: Creating a Google Site

Google sites is a free web builder from google that has been retooled into a viable option for personal sites and even business sites. It’s not as robust as a lot of paid tools but it doesn’t need to be. If you want to create a simple website for your small business or local services company then this may be the one to use. So let’s get started.

Creating your Google Site 

The first thing you will need to do is to find where you can make your site. Head to Sites.google.com and you will find the google sites page. If you already have a Google account you can create your site and host it for free on your google drive. At the top are some templates you can start with or a blank one to start from scratch. The bottom is where all of your sites will be when you start making them.

Let me show you the project I’m working on. This website is going to be a video production and marketing company for small businesses. This center pane is where all the content or the wording and graphics will be and this will be the only thing that visitors will see when they come to your website. At the top, you can click on the gear to format domain and analytics.

This side pane will have your insert, pages, and theme tabs. Insert is where you spend much of your time because this is where you will be adding and changing up much of what goes on the site. The Pages tab is how you will create and organize your pages on your website and themes is where you can change your theme if you would like to change the design.

Adding Content

After seeing the basic setting let’s build your homepage. We will do this by adding some content and a welcome message. I’ll insert a text box as a header and I’ll input my tagline or motto “Helping grow small businesses with the power of video”. I’ll also put a description of what our business does which I have pre-written in a google doc so ill create another text field and paste it. Then I can put a call to action to set up a strategy call. The button will go to a page to our booking page but we won't set that up until the episode so watch out for that when it drops.

I want to set up a few more pages to make my site functional. So I’ll add an about me page, services, blog, and contact. Let’s add my about me content, I'll add this content block for my background blurb and paste my content and then add my portrait photo and format it a bit and we are good. I can also add a video as a welcome message from the business owner or even as a promo video of the business.

I want to make sure I add a services page and put my services for clients to check out. I'll offer video production, promotion, and coaching for those who want to do it themselves so ill use this triple content block and add the details. Then if users are interested they can request a quote.

Review and Publishing

So once you have all your content on your website and formatted to your liking you will be ready to publish. Before we publish our website you need to preview your site before it goes live. To do this click the screen icons here, this will open up a new view of what visitors will see. You can also use the toolbar to switch views by device either phone or tablet or desktop.

Once the review is complete I can head to publish and it will open up the publish dialog box. Under web address, this will be how your website will look in the address bar and if you would like to add a custom domain you can do that in the domain tab but I’ll walk you through that in part 2.

Conclusion

Google sites is a simple and free platform to get a website up and running in a single day. You can experiment with types of content and design even with this tool, but you should plan your design and your content before you start working on Google sites which makes the process go much smoother.

Remember, Google sites are for simple small business websites. It’s not going to have a lot of features of a platform like Squarespace or Wix but that’s what tends to throw small business owners off because it’s “too complicated”. In part 2, I’ll show you how to upgrade the site with a custom domain, email address, appointment setting, and small business blog.

Funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.