Spruce up your Google Site with a template!

I learned today via Tech Crunch that Google Sites Become Prettier With Templates, and had a poke around in Kabissa's own Google Sites account. I found that, indeed, it is now possible to choose from a range of attractive and apparently thoughtfully designed website templates. This includes the depicted "NGO template" tailored for organizations that typically want to display the same kind of info on an impactful site. This is great news, especially for Kabissa members that we helped to move their domains to Google Apps when we shut down the Kabissa server this past spring.

Some details from the Tech Crunch post:

Google Sites, which launched a little under two years ago, have given businesses and consumers a way to quickly build their own websites with no HTML knowledge required, making it relatively easy for anyone without a technical background to build a simple website. Now, Google is making it infinitely easier for anyone to create sleek, attractive websites with new feature Templates.

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Google Sites now has a fully stocked gallery of public templates that can be used by both consumers and businesses. Google has also created templates that are targeted for business use. Templates let you quickly start a new site with pre-built content, embedded gadgets, page payouts, navigation links, theming and more.

From Google's own announcement of the new templates feature, it is apparent that the primary audience for the product is to let businesses enable their various departments create intranets, e.g. private spaces for project tracking or employee directories.

It seems, then, that we're not the primary clientele for it. I wouldn't be too surprised if Kabissa members were to run up against frustrating barriers quickly. Another website builder like Weebly or even a WordPress blog might be more suitable. If you need more than these free services offer, you might want to reconsider how you prioritize and pay for your web presence. A web developer in your community might be able to set up a nice site that you can maintain yourself at an affordable price.

And if you're not ready to devote alot of time, energy or money to creating your own website, you can always rely on your Kabissa profile to maintain a professional Internet presence for your organization and keep your followers informed of your activities and needs.

If you do end up creating your site with Google Sites and one of these new templates, let us know here how it goes! Click here for instructions if you're interested in setting up your Kabissa subdomain on Google Apps for email, team collaboration, and website hosting via Google Sites. 

Update: Mashable just wrote about this topic too at Google Sites Just Got a Whole Lot Prettier and pointed out something very interesting that I hadn't noticed yet:

Furthermore, the template gallery is public, and anyone can contribute. Given Google’s popularity, and the fact that Google Sites is a free service, we expect the gallery to be populated with dozens of great looking templates soon. Directions for adding a template to the gallery are here; you can also see an overview of Google Sites Templates in a video below.