Cooking Up Your Website

Creating a website can take up as much time as you will allow it; it will fill any available minute -- unless you have a game plan. If all you need is a simple website, Google Sites (already available in your Google Workspace environment) can fit the bill. This week, we will look at the ingredients you need to cook up your website in Google Sites.

Ingredients for a simple Google Site:

• 1 domain to publish your website on

• 1 Google Workspace account to access the Google Sites builder

• 5-6 pages worth of textual content*
  *The number and nature of pages depend on what you want on your site, but generally speaking, don't have more than 6 top-level navigation items if you can help it.

• Enough pictures to make each page interesting

• 1 Google Form for contacting you

• 1 Terms of Use document

• 1 Privacy Policy document

• 1 Disclaimer document

• 1 choice of Theme (a set of fonts, style, and an accent color for a cohesive look and feel)

Optional:

• 1-2 other complementary colors to your main accent color

• 1 logo

• 1 header image

• 1 blog or YouTube channel or other social media

• 1 direct booking URL

• 1 newsletter signup and email tool (usually outside of website)

• 1 Google Analytics account

Tips for end-users and small businesses:

💎 Before starting, have clarity about:

• Who is your audience?

• On what device(s) do you think they will access your website?

• What do you want them to do on your site?

• What information will they need to access?

• What information is first priority and what's secondary? This will help you with the page hierarchy.

Tips for mid-size companies and large enterprises:

💎 Google Sites are perfect for internal use for teams or projects. They allow your users to collect and display information in a more visual and accessible way. With the ease of use of Google Sites, your users won't need to have any experience in website development; they won't even have to write a single line of code.

❓ Did you enjoy this recipe? Leave a Comment.

Need help with Google Workspace? Contact me for a free first consult: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/get-in-touch/contact  

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

Productivity: Leave Yourself a Comment

Keeping track of your to-do list and action items can be tricky. Even if you write down what you need to do, you often actually have to go into your files, and figure out where you left off or what changes you were going to make and exactly where.

Tips for end-users and small businesses:

💎 Leaving a Comment for yourself in a Google file can actually help you achieve a number of things all in one:

• Setting an action item.

• Keeping track of action items/to-do list: action items can be searched for in Google Drive easily from the Search options.

• You will know exactly where and what needs to be done, down to the letter.

• You can even add reference materials to your Comments so you have everything in a single place.

💎💎 If you @ or + mention yourself, you can get an email that can then be sent to your Google Tasks list and even allocated on your Google Calendar on a specific day. And this way, you have a workflow!

So don't be shy about leaving Comments and conversing with yourself in Google files.

Tips for mid-size companies and large enterprises:

💎 Commenting can come in handy even in larger organizations the same way as above. 

💎 This is  a powerful tool to get work done collectively, as a team -- ideal for teams who are remote and/or distributed geographically and have to work across time zones.

❓ Do you use the Comment functionality?

Need help with Google Workspace? Contact me for a free first consult: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/get-in-touch/contact  

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

Productivity: Take Note!

There are lots of note-taking tools out there. You don't even have to venture out of Google Workspace to find several that might work for you. But the tricky part is not where to take notes, but how to organize them in a way that will make it easy to find what you are looking for later on -- quickly. Hello, Productivity!

While I enjoy some of the features of Google Keep (Google's ad-hoc note-taking tool), like OCR or optical character recognition to grab the text out of images for easier note taking, I miss the organized layout of Google Drive.

Tips for end-users and small businesses:

So, having experimented with Google Keep for a while, I have decided to keep it (pun intended) for shopping lists, but have settled back on Google Drive, and primarily Docs as my note taking tool:

💎 I recommend creating a dedicated "Notes" folder in which to keep notes files per topic or client. My default file type is Docs.

💎 You can get the same OCR as you get in Keep if you upload a file into Drive and right click to open it with Docs.

💎 You can change the color of your "Notes" folder so it will stand out. 

💎 You can add extra symbols in the folder name so it gets sorted to the top.

💎 You can come up with a naming convention for your files; you can even create subfolders.

💎 You can sort them in a variety of ways.

💎 You can add action items for yourself from Comments that you can then find from a Drive search.

💎 You can even dictate your notes!

💎 You can surface the notes using shortcuts into other folders.

💎 And best of all, you can look at your notes files in List view or in Grid view with a click.

💎 Searchability is excellent in Drive, and the results are easy to view!

💎 And alluding to our previous post: "If it has a URL, it can be linked!" -- You can drop links into a Google Doc for anything you need to reference.

Tips for mid-size companies and large enterprises:

💎 Introduce your users to different ways of note taking so everyone can find one that works best for them. When it comes to note taking, people's preferences vary quite a bit.

❓ Do you prefer Drive or Keep for note taking? Let me know in a Comment.

Need help with Google Workspace? Contact me for a free first consult: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/get-in-touch/contact  

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

Productivity: Link, Link, Link!

This week, we talk about how linking can increase productivity, reduce clutter, and save money on storage.

Tips for end-users and small businesses:

💎In Gmail:

• If you use Google Drive and you don't have a particular need to send something as an attachment, don't!

Instead, make sure the file is shared appropriately, and go ahead and 

Create a text link to a file in your message,

or

Drop the URL into the text of the email message.

Why? Because downloading a file creates extra copies that you then have to do version control on, creating a potential for clutter; the copies will take up extra storage space, not to mention you will have to keep all copies updated (yikes, what  a time suck).

💎In Google Calendar:

• Have a recurring meeting? Link your agenda or material file(s) you want to collaborate on. This way, you can have a single file, continuity of agendas and actions, and you never have to add the meeting topics into the meeting events. Just make sure the file is shared appropriately.

💎In Google Drive and its files:

• Don't duplicate presentation after presentation for your talks, simply copy the relevant slides and make sure you keep the live link so you can update the main presentation just once and have an automated way to update the rest with the click of a button.

• Cross-reference documents by linking from one file to the other.

• Use the Shortcut functionally of Google Drive to avoid duplicating and versioning of your files, yet still have the ability to surface files in multiple folders.

Don't forget that linkability is also present in other Google tools, such as Google Chat.

👉 If it has a URL, it can be linked!

❓ Do you have a favorite tip among these? Leave a Comment for me. Or is there a tip you have that's not listed here? Do share.

Tips for mid-size companies and large enterprises:

💎 Teach your users to utilize and fully leverage the cross-linking of content across all the Google Workspace tools to save time and to increase Productivity while reducing version control issues.

Need help with Google Workspace? Contact me for a free first consult: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/get-in-touch/contact  

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter