Google Sites brings you over 100 new web fonts

(Cross-posted to the Google Enterprise Blog)

Ever wanted to make your Google site feel even more unique? Today, we added a wide variety of Google Web Fonts to Google Sites, making it easier to style your website and make it look awesome.

Now you can go to Manage Site under More Actions and choose Color and Fonts in the left-hand navigation to choose fonts for the entire site in one go. The web fonts feature lets you select different sections of the site such as the entire page or just the title to selectively choose your styling. Additionally, we've given you control over font sizes for many of these sections.

Take a look at a site that uses multiple web fonts:

We’re looking forward to seeing the sites you create with these beautiful new fonts.

Posted by: Robert Dionne, Software Engineer

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Google Science Fair seeks budding Einsteins and Curies

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog, Google Student Blog and Google LatLong Blog)

Are you a student who loves science? Do you have a good idea for an experiment that you’d like to share with the world? In 1996, two young computer science students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a hypothesis that there was a better way to find information on the web. They did their research, tested their theories and built a search engine which (eventually) changed the way people found information online. Larry and Sergey were fortunate to be able to get their idea in front of lots of people. But how many ideas are lost because people don’t have the right forum for their talents to be discovered? We believe that science can change the world—and one way to encourage that is to celebrate and champion young scientific talent as we do athletes and pop idols.

To help make today’s young scientists the rock stars of tomorrow, in partnership with CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, we’re introducing the first global online science competition: the Google Science Fair. It’s open to students around the world who are between the ages of 13-18. All you need is access to a computer, the Internet and a web browser.

You may have participated in local or regional science fairs where you had to be in the same physical space to compete with kids in your area. Now any student with an idea can participate from anywhere, and share their idea with the world. You build and submit your project—either by yourself or in a team of up to three—entirely online. Students in India (or Israel or Ireland) will be able to compete with students in Canada (or Cambodia or Costa Rica) for prizes including once-in-a-lifetime experiences (like a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer), scholarships and real-life work opportunities (like a five-day trip to CERN in Switzerland). And if you’re entering a science fair locally, please feel free to post that project online with Google Science Fair, too!

To enter, register online and create your project as a Google Site. Registration is open through April 4, 2011. Please note: you must get parental or guardian consent in order to compete. You can check out the complete rules here. After April 4, we’ll begin judging and will announce our semi-finalists in early May.

The semi-finalist projects will be posted on our online gallery, where we’ll encourage the public to vote for a “people’s choice” winner. From our list of semi-finalists, we’ll select 15 finalists to bring their projects to Google headquarters on July 11 to compete in our final, live event, where world-renowned science judges will select a winner in each age category, as well as a grand-prize winner.

Here's an example of a great science fair project site to inspire you. We asked Tesca, a U.S. high school senior from Oregon, to create it for us based on an award-winning project she’s been working on for years. Tesca’s objective is to make hospitals more efficient using artificial intelligence—a world-changing goal, to be sure.

So if you think you're the next Albert Einstein, Marie Curie—or Larry Page or Sergey Brin—sign up today for the Google Science Fair. Prove once again how science can change the world!

Posted by Cristin Frodella and Samantha Peter, Education Product Marketing Managers

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Our favorite Docs things - 2010 Year in Review

We’ve been keeping busy this year with over 85 new enhancements to Google Docs and Google Sites, making it possible for you to work, communicate and collaborate entirely in the cloud. We wanted to take a moment to share a few of the most exciting enhancements from 2010 that are making it easier for you to go “100% web.”

In addition to some of the most requested favorite features like mobile editing, OCR, advanced sorting rules and a more consistent look, here are more of our team’s favorite things from this last year:

• A new Google Docs built from the ground up for real-time collaboration
• The new Google drawings editor for making flowcharts, diagrams and more
• Upload and store your files in the cloud and stop worrying about losing files
• Simplified sharing with new features like “Private”
• New charts editor and chart types because pictures are worth 1000 words
• New revision history UI in documents and spreadsheets make it easier to see what has changed
• Horizontal navigation in Sites gives you more options when building your sites
• More fonts in documents provide you with more ways to express yourself
• Formula highlighting in spreadsheets makes it easier to understand your formulas
• Google Docs demo makes it easier for anyone to try Google Docs

We look forward to bringing you more improvements next year. Let us know what is at the top of your Google Docs and Sites wish list in the comments.

On behalf of the entire the Google Docs and Google Sites teams, happy holidays! We’ll see you in the New Year!

Posted by: Jonathan Rochelle, Director, Product Management

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Improving team collaboration and productivity with Google Sites

If you’re interested in learning more about Google Sites, this cross post from the Google Enterprise Blog might interest you.

Effective collaboration has become a key driver to improve team productivity. Project teams, often located across disparate locations and time zones, produce and distribute content in different formats and platforms. Teams need to consolidate relevant information in one place that’s easy to navigate and retrieve. Contributors and reviewers have specific needs to manage the creative process, maintain the project plan and keep all stakeholders informed.

With Google Sites, you can easily manage projects and create, share, find, and publish content across your organization. Easy to use features such as site and page templates and embedded documents make it easy for any user to create useful sites. Google Sites can be used for company intranets, portals, team project and more. Furthermore, the Google Sites API gives third-party developers a way to access, integrate with, and extend the platform. The To-Do gadget is an example of extending a Google Site with a tool that can enable teams to track and manage tasks.

Join Scott Johnston, Group Product Manager of Google Sites, and me for a live webinar on Tuesday, December 7th to learn more about improving collaboration and team productivity. I’ll start with an overview of Google Sites and highlight features that can help teams be more productive. We will be featuring a live demo.

Register to attend the live webinar on 12/7 @ 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6 pm GMT.

We hope to see you there.

Posted by Lisa Ding, Google Sites Team

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Recapping the Google Sites webinar

Guest post: Stephen Hind (commonly known as Steegle) has been a Top Contributor in the Google Sites help forum since its launch in January 2009. Top Contributors are Google-recognized participants of our help forums who exemplify excellent product knowledge, are consistently kind and respectful to others, and are helpful in the forum. He’s an avid user of Google Sites both professionally and personally, and creates and manages Google Sites for other businesses. His website (www.steegle.com) contains many FAQs and how-tos for Google Sites and receives 30,000 visits per month.

I began using Google Sites when it was first released for Google Apps in February 2008. When I created my first site, I saw that Google Sites offered the features I wanted on any site: a navigation gadget; a breadcrumb trail; a hierarchical structure; a simple editor; and a configurable look and feel. Since then, I’ve been offering support to other users because I enjoy helping others get the most out of their sites.

At the beginning of September, Google invited me to present a webinar as part of the Get British Business Online campaign (gbbo.co.uk) to demonstrate how to get more out of Google Sites. The webinar was offered three times that day maximize how many people could watch. During the webinar I presented on these topics:

• how to create and edit pages
• revert to previous versions of pages
• add a logo
• change and customise themes
• change site width
• edit sidebar and horizontal navigation
• add images directly and from Picasa Web Albums
• add gadgets for maps, contact us forms and videos.

After the presentation I held a Q&A session. Two questions surfaced in every session: “Why does my site not appear in Google Search?” and “How can I see how many people have visited my site?” I answered these by explaining how to register a Google Site with Google Webmaster Tools and demonstrating how to add Google Analytics to the site. It was great to offer these simple tips to help attendees guarantee the success of their own sites.

It was a wonderful opportunity to show others how Google Sites provides an easy and quick way to create informative and reliable websites. The feedback I received, and continue to get, gives me great encouragement to continue to help the Google Sites community, and I look forward to future opportunities to increase Google Sites usage.

Posted by: Stephen Hind, Google Sites Power User

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New in Google Docs and Google Sites

Two big advantages of building web applications are frequent feature releases and easier cross-product sharing. Today we have a little of both for you. This week, we are adding version history to uploaded files in the documents list as well as drop downs in horizontal navigation and a new sharing experience to Google Sites.

Version history
Earlier this year, we added the ability to “Upload any file” to Google Docs so that you upload, store, and share any file up to 1 GB in size. Now you can upload new versions of the same file to your document list. Previously, each time you updated a file, you would have to upload the new version as a new file with a new URL, re-share it, and put in the correct folders again.

When you select the “Add or manage versions” option on any file, you can upload new versions of a file, download previous versions, and delete older versions.

Drop down menu in horizontal navs
Sometimes, you want to group information using drop downs and now you can by going More actions > Manage site > Site layout.

New sharing experience
Back in June, we made sharing easier in Google Docs. Today, we extended this simplified sharing experience to Google Sites, unifying the sharing experience across Google Docs and Google Sites. As with Google Docs, Google Sites now be set to one of three visibility options: private, anyone with the link, or public on the web.

The new visibility option is always available at a glance at the top of each site.

With this update, the new “Anyone with the link” setting makes your site available to anyone that knows the unique URL, but blocks search engines from indexing the site. And for those times that someone sends you a link to a site but you don’t have access, you can now request access to that site from the access denied page.

As always, we’d love your feedback and if you have any questions, please check out our document list and Google Sites help pages.

Posted by: Mike Procopio, Software Engineer

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Google Apps Script support in Google Sites

Google Apps Scripts can save time by sending emails, scheduling calendar events and more with one click.

We just announced on the Google Enterprise Blog that you can now create, edit, and launch Google Apps Scripts from any Google Site. For example, you can create a site to browse and sign up for training sessions. On a training site, you could have a “Register Now” button on each classes page that would automatically add users to the class roster, add the class to their Google Calendar, and email them to confirm enrollment.

To learn more about how to automate tasks in Google Sites using Google Apps Scripts, check out our post on the Google Enterprise Blog.

Posted by: Laurent Tu, Google Apps Software Engineer

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Tips & Tricks: Making the most of your sidebar in Google Sites

The sidebar on a Google site helps site visitors find what they are looking for and stays with the user as they navigate the site. Let’s take a look at how you can take advantage of this space.

For example, let’s say you’ve gone on a few trips this summer, and you want to create a site to organize and document your travels. You want each destination linked on the sidebar of your travelogue site.

To access the sidebar menu, go to More actions > Manage site > Site layout (you can also click the Edit sidebar link under your sidebar).

Rearranging order of the links
By default, Google Sites organizes links in alphabetical order, but you can also arrange the pages in the order you visited them.

Click the Edit link within the Navigation box. In the Configure Navigation window, uncheck the box next to ‘Automatically organize my navigation.’ Next, add your pages manually (with the Add page link) and rearrange them with the arrows on the right. The up-down arrows change the order of the pages, and the left-right arrows allow you “indent” a page within another, making it a subpage.

Resizing the sidebar
You can also control the width of the sidebar via Site layout > Change site layout and entering in a new width.

Changing the color of the font
There’s also flexibility when it comes to changing the colors of the text in the sidebar. To find these settings, go to More actions > Manage site > Colors and Fonts.

Adding email addresses or links to other sites
If your travel buddies have their own websites, and you’d like to link to them from yours, you could add external links to your sidebar. Go to Site layout and edit the Navigation box. In the Configure Navigation window, select Add URL and enter in a URL and text to display.

Adding text and images
After you’ve reordered and added external links to your sidebar, you may decide that you’d like to add some information about yourself to your site. Since you can add and format text to the sidebar, as well as insert images and links, it’s easy to create a bio profile. Simply go to Site layout > Add a new sidebar item > Text.


Horizontal navigation
After adding the bio, you notice that the sidebar area got a little crowded. Luckily, there’s a new feature called horizontal navigation that allows you to move your navigation links to across the top of the site.

Go to Site layout > Change site layout and check the box next to Horizontal navigation bar. A new section on the site layout preview will pop up, called “Horizontal navigation bar.” You can customize the horizontal navigation bar the same way you reorganized the links earlier.

Let’s take a look at the result:

The Google Sites team will be adding some new functionality to horizontal navigation soon, so look out for that announcement on this blog.

Posted by: Lisa Ding, Consumer Operations Associate

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Keyboard shortcuts in Google Sites

We’re big believers in speed and saving time, which is why we’re happy to announce that we’ve added keyboard shortcuts to common actions like create page and edit page for site collaborators using Google Sites. You can see a full list of keyboard shortcuts here, or simply type Ctrl / (⌘ / on a Mac) to open the shortcut help.

You can disable keyboard shortcuts on the Sites user setting page. Are there other common actions that you’d like to see added to keyboard shortcuts? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by: Michael Verrilli, Software Engineer

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Easier site organization with drag and drop

Page organization is an important part of using Google Sites, especially when you want to make a lot of changes to your Site’s structure. To make it easier and save you time, we just enabled drag and drop functionality in the Pages area of site management. Site owners and collaborators can try it out on via Manage site > Pages in the tree view.

We hope you like this little time-saver.

Posted by: Santos Cordon, Software Engineer

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