Pr. Lehmann and I reworked his church’s web site yesterday, converting it from the old Google Pages system to the new Google Sites system. We are happy with the results.
St. John's Lutheran Church in the Cove
The entire rework occurred in just one day, with both of us working on it. We picked a theme and started building pages. Pastor made the custom transparent header.
The system was easy-to-use. Each page can be set to have attachments or comments and can also be set to show up in the left-hand navigation menu. Sites can be public or shared between Gmail users.
Pages can be normal or have special templates such as a Dashboard or Announcements. We used an Announcement page to store all of Pastor’s sermons. The order of the announcements can’t be changed, but it looks more professional as part of the site than storing all of the sermons in a separate blog.
Google has a plethora of gadgets that can be used on any page. Pastor’s sermon pages have an audio gadget that play recordings when he has them. On the “How to get here” page, a gadget lets you type in your address, and it will generate the Google map with directions in another window. The calendar gadget integrates the church’s Google calendar into the site very nicely.
There is some room for improvement. The site settings that show the basic layout of each page seem to imply that you can manually alter the footer. We were not able to. The editor would not accept a <br clear="all"> tag to break a page and let a new section of the page start below a picture. Announcements can’t be dated and rearranged. Even if an image has been uploaded to one page, it has to be uploaded again if you want to use the same graphic in another page. Google lets you choose between one- and two-column page styles, but the two-column style is fixed at 50% width. 66-33 and 75-25 styles, available using Yahoo! grids, would have been nice.
All in all, the rework was good, cheap (as in free), and easy. One doesn’t get all three very often. I would recommend this over some professional solutions for smaller churches and organizations.
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Thanks for all your help on the site!
Any chance a forum or message board is included?
There’s a Google gadget that ties into Google groups, but it’s small and wouldn’t look like the typical forum or discussion form. I’d probably implement that as a separate site rather than try to include it into a Google Site page.