Creating a Small Business Website Part 2: Professional Site Upgrades

Do you have a small business google site and are looking for an upgrade? In this second part, let’s take your small business google site, give it an upgrade and make it a functional business site.

In part 1, I showed you how to use Google sites to create a simple website for your small business. In this part, I’ll show how to upgrade your site with a professional domain & email, set up an appointment calendar to schedule, and set up a blog. So, let’s get started. 

Step 1: Professional

Now that we have our business site set up and published, you may have noticed the web address for our website starts with sites.google.com/ with our business site name at the top of our builder page. If you want to have a professional site you want to have a professional domain that people can trust instead of some random name. 

Domain name 

Head to your google site and enter your google site editing screen. To add a domain, click on the gear in the top bar and move down to custom domains, and “Start Setup”. 

So you have 2 options: If you already bought a domain name then you can add it to your site or you can buy a domain directly from google domains, so let’s do that. Once you get to Google domains you can search for the name you like to choose. 

Let’s search Botello.Media and since it's a more unique address that's going to be $30/year but many addresses are $12/year. Once you have made a decision, buy the domain and check out. 

Professional email

Now that you have a professional domain you will want to connect a professional email address. For my example, I’ll create Joshua@Botello.media for an extra $12 a month and connect via Google Workspace automatically

Step 2: Appointment Settings

If you have created a professional website and are looking to automate your customer interactions then integrating a booking app like Calendly is a good option to get customers to set up free strategy meetings or have multiple meeting types if you deal with a few different types of clients. 

Head to Calendly.com and sign up for a free account. If you have multiple types of meetings then you will need to upgrade since the free account allows only 1 type. Once you are logged in you can set up account type, schedule, and how you are going to be contacted by phone or video meeting. 

Speaking of meetings, if you are looking to set up virtual meetings anywhere and save on costs then you can set up any meeting program like google meet from your google account. 

I'm partial to zoom so we will set up a zoom account. Head to Zoom.us and sign up for a free zoom account. Once you follow the prompts you then be able to set up your account to schedule meetings. You will then need to integrate your meetings so head to zoom apps and search Calendly, this will connect your zoom account to the Calendly you just created. Finally, there are some settings you want to have like creating a new ID every time a new appointment is made and allowing clients to share and join the meeting with or without you. 

Once you have set up your booking page and meeting software of choice. Head to the main appointment page and click copy link then go to the page you’d like to have your appointment page.  You can make this accessible through the menu or how I’m doing only by calls to action to click. Once someone sets up an appointment it should get put on your calendar and then you will be able to meet with them.  

Step 3: Blogging

Our last step to making this a nice professional site is to include a blog. Here you can share news about the business or some articles about your industry or tips that you would like to share with your visitors. 

There are a couple of ways to do this and I should tell you now that Google sites are not a blogging platform. If you periodically create articles and don’t that often then google sites will work. However, if you are looking to blog regularly you may want to choose a different platform before you do this or embed from a different source. 

To create a blog, we will create a page called blog and set up our page. Our blog will be created in reverse chronological order so the newest posts will be the first ones you see on the top. I already wrote an article in a Google Doc and if you want to know more about how to blog check out our video on blogging to get started. 

Let’s create the article page which will have all the content and copy and paste everything we need and format it. Then we will create a preview snippet by grabbing the title card, adding our title and the first few sentences of our blog, and a link to read more. As you can see this is a pretty manual process so if you are going to do this full-time another platform will do this way better.

To slightly automate this process we can bring in a blog and embed the content from the blogger. Let’s head to blogger from our google account and start a blog I’ll choose a fairly simple design because I want it to go with my site. With Blogger, I can create an article and set up auto scheduling to schedule posts and not have to worry about manually doing this. 

Now, let’s embed! Grab the address of your blog's homepage and then go to your blog page on the google site and click embed and paste the address under “by URL”. You can see there’s extra stuff I don’t want to show up you can add “?m=1” to the end and only show the articles to make viewing easier. 

Conclusion

You have successfully created a professional website with the ability to schedule appointments and create content to put your best foot forward for little to no money with this guide. 

Remember, having a professional domain and email is going to cost something. Calendly is free but if you do multiple types of appointments then you will have to upgrade your account and you can definitely get away with using zoom for meetings for free. 

Finally, blogging on google sites isn't the easiest thing in the world, but if you are just getting started it is very inexpensive and intuitive to run provided you aren’t constantly blogging. In part 3, I’ll show you how to use a free plug-in to create a simple eCommerce function on your business website. 

What do you think? Do you use a Google Site for your small business? Let me know down in the comments.

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.