San Francisco — Expanding in to the territories of web designing, Google Sites, which was introduced around two years back, on Tuesday Google announced the addition of new templates and a public gallery, empowering businesses and consumers an endlessly simplifies for anyone to create sleek, attractive websites with new feature Templates to quickly build their own websites with no HTML knowledge required.
The search giant introduced Google Sites in February, 2008 and has appealed to tens of millions of users since then. Google Sites is based on technology Google benefited with its acquisition of JotSpot, a provider of wiki creation tools in October, 2006.
Now available to both free and paid users, the new product delivers pre-defined starter templates that includes entire collaborative workspaces, employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites, and employee profile pages and more.
Each template is made up of between 15 and 20 pre-defined pages, including sample content, embedded gadget, page layouts, navigation links, and themes. The templates can easily be altered, up to a point, using Google Sites’ built-in editing tools.
Google is offering a public gallery of templates that users can add, too. “What we are really attempting to address is the current state of business collaboration which is still broken,” Scott Johnston, project manager for Google Sites, said in a statement.
As for organizations employing the paid Google Apps Premium Edition, will also have a private place where employees can share branded site templates, which can be made via Sites’ recently established API, with coworkers, Johnston said.
In that way, standard templates can be used across individual departments or entire companies, as the customer desires. This is more beneficial to organizations, such as the Boy Scouts of America, which wants to share templates for chapters over the nation to launch as their platform.
Johnston said Sites was formulated to give more people the ability to publish content on the Web. “There are really limits to the number of people who can publish content in an organization. It either requires a very expensive or time-consuming solution that takes a long time to set up,” he said.
Ron Brister, senior manager of worldwide IT operations for Serena Software said his company is shifting its project workspace collaboration to Google Sites “because it requires less expertise and administration than SharePoint, and it is easier for employees to use. Better ease-of-use directly translates into more fluid information-sharing, which helps our teams move faster and cross-pollinate good ideas,” he said in a statement.
“The rate that businesses are adopting Google Sites has exceeded our expectations, and templates will make Sites even more useful by dramatically reducing the time it takes to set up collaborative workspaces like employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites and employee profile pages,” says Johnston.
Several dozen templates are available, with more being added.
Personal templates are also available, including family sites, weddings, neighborhood associations, clubs, charitable causes, and other interests, said Johnston.
Nevertheless, Google Sites templates will appeal to companies and users alike who wants to get up-and-running quickly and cheaply, and who value ease-of-use more than an overload of enterprise features that often get in the way.