Create useful websites for your business with updates in new Google Sites

Having up-to-date information is key to getting work done—whether it’s understanding the status of a project, sharing updates on your team’s priorities, or quickly looking up company policies and documentation. With Google Sites, it’s easy to create high-quality websites to centralize business information (without needing design or programming chops!). 

We’ve been making some product improvements to make Sites an even more robust tool for companies. Here are the highlights.

• Choose from new template options. To give you a helpful head start, soon Sites will feature a template gallery with common site types to use. Simply create a site from the template, like you would a Google Doc, and start populating your site. We will also soon make it possible for companies to add domain-specific templates to their galleries, such as templates customized to a company’s specific workflows or brand guidelines.

• Use intelligent search. We’re also introducing a Cloud Search integration to bring the power of Google’s search technology to your site. This will make it even easier for employees to find critical G Suite information quickly, and is available to G Suite paid users who have Cloud Search enabled. Aline Hatter, senior project specialist at Nielsen, says, "having our intranet on Google Sites helps all of our employees quickly and easily find any information they are looking for. With the addition of Cloud Search in Sites, searching and finding relevant content across G Suite is easier than ever.”

• View and restore earlier drafts. We’re bringing version history to Sites—the same version history that’s used in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. So if you accidentally delete a page, or want to know who made a change, no problem—just restore an earlier version or view a log of changes through version history.

• Review changes to draft sites. It’s important to feel confident about any changes you are about to publish to a website, so we’re making it easier for you to review the changes made to a draft site before it goes live. Changes will be annotated in the side panel, and you’ll also see a side-by-side visual comparison of the draft site and published version. This way, you can confidently publish content, or return to the draft and revise.

• Provide feedback to site creators. Information is only useful if it’s up-to-date and accurate, which is why we recently made it possible for site viewers to provide feedback to paid G Suite site owners if something looks stale on a site. With a click of a button, share feedback to the site owner (without leaving the page) or ask questions. The owner will be notified via email. Plus, at the bottom of a sites page, viewers can easily see when it was last modified.

These changes come on the heels of other recent improvements to Sites, like the ability to add collapsible text boxes to your site to condense large blocks of text for readers, as well as a table of contents which automatically updates when the page is edited. 

Build a site for your business

Sites works similarly to Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides—you can collaborate and edit a draft site at the same time as a colleague, and, once published, sites can be accessed from desktop and mobile devices. And because Sites is a part of G Suite, it tightly integrates with other productivity apps, making it easy to embed documents or presentations stored in Drive, for example. 

Take the Information Technology Agency for the city of Los Angeles. They are using Sites to share information for many different departments. “City departments ranging from human resources to emergency planning have created robust, terrific-looking sites using Sites that didn’t require IT involvement,” says Ted Ross, General Manager and CIO. “We can focus on programming, and employees are empowered to generate good content as needed.”

Like the rest of G Suite, Sites has easy-to-use, fine-grained security controls so you can decide who can view your site both inside and outside of your company. To build your Google Site, type in “Sites.new” into your browser and begin adding text and modules as you please. Check out Sites tips from our Learning Center to help you get started, too.