Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to give you an opportunity to learn about how content management systems work, by trying Google Sites. It’s a tool from Google that is free, easy to use, and serves as an excellent way to try things out. It’s especially helpful if you are just starting out and feeling a bit intimidated, or if you are like me and find it frustrating to deal with technical issues.

Google Sites is not perfect, but it can help you to “concentrate on the content” and give you an opportunity to jump over a lot of the technical hurdles that you run into, even with a system like Drupal. There’s no installation, and only a basic amount of setup with Google Sites. You can literally have a website going in less than 60 seconds.

So in a way, it can be a fun way to get started learning about CMS. Google Sites is a content management system; it just happens to be from Google. And it does have many of the features of a typical CMS like Drupal, so it can give you a chance to try some CMS features out, including sharing the site with other users. Like Drupal, Google Sites allows you to invite other people to work on the site, from wherever they are, and they don’t need technical experience to do it. And that is one of the great strengths of CMS-based sites—they allow you to collaborate more easily.