My Google site: presenting David Ford
Oh my goodness me. I love Google but Google sites is not their finest hour. I think the word frustration has been mentioned in other 23-thingers blogs regarding this one and I concur. As part of a task and finish group last summer I had the task of creating our profile pages using Google sites. I absolutely love doing things like this but it took a lot of patience to get it even vaguely how I wanted it thanks to the functionality, or lack thereof, of Google sites. One advantage to using Google sites was that we already have a staff Google account so we didn't need to sign up to another provider and it meant everyone could log-in to edit their own page. But the main thing I did find beneficial to this project was that it was extremely easy duplicate sites- once I had created the basic template I could quite quickly and simply replicate this for everyone in our team, all that was required then was individual cutomization.
However all the difficulties came flooding back when I tried to create a new page for this week's Thing. It's just so hard to get things to look how you want to look. You have to keep saving and then checking what that looks like every time you edit as the preview never seems to even nearly match what you want. It's very hard to re-size things or move them where you want to go. It takes ages to find a template and theme that can work for you and then you spend forever trying to customize it to make it look slightly less naff. Seriously, learning basic HTML and CSS is quicker and easier than this.
This time round the thing I found most annoying was trying to add gadgets. If you want a basic, static site then Google sites is fine. However I think sites should be pulling in information from all arenas- RSS feeds, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr etc via gadgets/widgets. As Google own YouTube, this gadget is prominently featured, for any others you have to face searching the dregs of public gadgets, only a few that you might want to use are "featured", you have to hunt down any others. If I was more tecchy I could create a gadget myself, but I'm not. I think to get what I was aiming to achieve there are far better tools available....Netvibes and Tumblr come to mind. If I left behind my love of gadgets and stopped trying to make Google sites something it's not then, as a fair assessment, I can see the advantages of it and can see its uses as a good wiki to share information in a team; it has the function to upload documents etc. and it is easy to use if you're happy with a basic looking page to share and store information. Could do better, Google, could do better....
Thing #13 summary:
Stay simple and Google sites is fine, beyond that look elsewhere if you want to keep your sanity.....
https://sites.google.com/site/evolutiosite/Photo: David Ford at the Borderline 2011 taken by Ellie
As if to prove my point I moved to a different computer went back to the site and everything was in a totally different place than I wanted it. I tried moving something and ending up losing a gadget. I am going to give up before my brain implodes.
ReplyDelete