Google Sites, more powerful than ever in its latest update
We are in the era of information and collaboration, and Google is one of the companies that has been able to interpret it with the highest accuracy. One of the best examples is its Google Sites tool, within G Suite, which enables professional websites to be created for project teams or intranets without the need for knowledge of HTML programming. This way, users can access always up to date information, share the latest modifications about the most important issues or even check corporate documentation and policies. And with the latest additions that Google has introduced on Google Sites, it will be easier than ever.
Google Sites exemplifies the Olympic “Citius, altius, fortius”
This Latin motto, which translates as “Faster, higher, stronger”, was spoken by Baron Pierre de Coubertin during the opening of the first Olympic Games of the Modern Age (Athens, 1896). It demonstrates athletes’ constant striving towards perfection and achievement, but it can be extended to any field, such as technology for example.
In this sense, in the last update published of Google Sites, the G Suite tool designed for the creation of business websites, it seems to apply 100%. The reason? It incorporates a series of interesting new developments created to:
- Streamline users’ work (Citius)
- Obtain the maximum performance from the cloud (Altius)
- Offer a more robust tool for businesses (Fortius)
The latest developments of the latest version of Google Sites that we are talking about are:
- New options from templates. With the new Google Sites update, users will be able to create websites much more quickly and easily thanks to the predefined templates of websites that the tool will incorporate: they will only need to select the template and start to insert their site content. In future updates, Google will continue working on this line. According to their corporate blog, businesses will be able to add “specific domain templates to their galleries, such as customised templates for specific workflows of the company or the brand guidelines”.
- Intelligent search. From this Google Sites update, it integrates with Cloud Search so that when users search on the site, they use the same technology as the Google search engine. Thanks to this important integration (available to G Suite paid users who have Cloud search enabled), the critical information from G Suite will be much faster and easily reachable.
- Viewing and restoring previous drafts. This Google Sites update incorporates version history, with the same technology as other important G Suite tools (Docs, Sheets and Slides). This feature will enable users of Google Sites:
- To know when and who created or made modifications on a specific page
- To know when and who deleted a page from the site
- To restore previously deleted pages.
- Review of new changes in the drafts of the sites. In the same way that Google Sites users can see information about the previous changes, in this latest update they can also review the changes pending publication. The changes will have been carried out in a draft and will be displayed on a side panel, also offering the possibility of making a comparison between the published version and the draft version. It is up to the user’s discretion to publish the pending content or to modify it again.
- Comments to site creators. The latest update published of Google Sites allows users, without leaving a page, to write and send comments to the creators of paid G Suite sites with one click (a good example is informing them that some published content is obsolete). The owner will receive an email with the notification of these comments. Finally, it displays the date that a page was last modified at the bottom when it is looked at.
- Other recent changes. Immediately prior to this last update, Google Sites also incorporated interesting features. These include:
- Option of adding drop down text boxes to condense large blocks of text
- Option of adding an index which automatically updates when a page is edited.
As you will have seen, Google Sites benefits from the powerful features of integration, collaboration and multi-platform belonging to G Suite. In addition, it enables simple but powerful security controls to be applied to the website created.
At Intelligence Partner, as a Google Cloud Premier Partner, we have built up significant experience and knowledge in Google’s cloud based tools which integrate G Suite, such as Google Sites for example.
If you want this last tool to be a touchstone in your organisation’s web strategy, don’t hesitate to contact us. Tell us the objectives you want to achieve, and our experts will show you how Google Suites can help you to reach them.
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