Hey do any of you have any advice on how to make a better website for teams? We have been using google sites but feel like its too limited and there could be a better alternative, thanks in advance lolz!
What do you feel is limited about Google sites that you want to work past? Our team has done Weebly, fully from scratch, using static site generators and now we actually just recently landed on Google sites specifically because it is so limited that anyone can be in charge of it.
There’s lots of ways to go, but mainly the biggest factor should be what you intend to use it for and what capabilities it needs to have. Do you need a backend for data storage/query? Do you need a login system for private data? Who will be responsible for maintaining it? A programming team or your business/marketing team?
Wix is a pretty user friendly option to try out.
It’s hard to beat a simple Wordpress site. Most hosting companies have an installer for it. It’s limited and has its issues but there are tons of tutorials for it which is nice
Just make sure you do your best to secure it. Mainly changing your login url and installing something like wordfence
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Wordpress is a great option whether you self host it, or set it up on wordpress.com. There are tons of plugins and themes you can get for fantastic visuals along with useful tools and programs that you can deploy on your site.
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Recently I just led our team through a large renovation and modernization of our website. It was at least 10 years old, people couldn’t find what they needed, and we were swamped with emails for basic questions.
At first the students were saying “Wordpress sucks, we need [insert name of something else]!!” but I led them through a different exercise. I asked them to think of every audience member that might come to our site. (So current parents, future parents, students, future students, other teams, etc.) Then I had them think of any possible use case they might have while there. (So like read team updates, sign up for our program, see archive materials from the past, find our social media, donate money, etc.) Then we tried to highlight the top 5 things that were most important.
After that exercise, it led us to reorganize everything on the site differently, and focus on what needed to be highlighted on home pages and easy to find in menus/navigation. It shifted it away from “Wordpress sucks” to “our site sucks” and think through how to actually do the work to fix it.
So Google Sites might be limiting to you, but it’s probably not that limiting, or there’s something else that’s really feeling limiting about it. Perhaps thinking through your users, the use cases, and the needs of the team might help you all think about what to do with redoing your site.
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This is the mindset of someone looking to learn something for fun.
This is the mindset of someone engineering an effective product for another person.
The question I’d have to OP - what does your team (not you) consider your website to be?
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I’ll take the opposite stance. WordPress is both robust and ubiquitous, which often makes it the popular choice. However, it’s heavy, highly vulnerable, and relies on third party tooling for a lot of functionality (which may disappear over time).
The biggest advantage of WordPress is that it’s free to host yourself, but there are other solutions out there which are just user friendly without a cost.
I definitely wouldn’t deploy it without better word press security or similar products. And like any tool it’s on you to keep it up to date. But I still think it’s a wonderful 0 cost option. And there are a lot of good learning opportunities for students with it
I think you’re mostly right about this, but it is worth mentioning that Google Sites is almost too simplified. You don’t have much choice over how specific elements look because as far as I’ve been able to tell there isn’t support for custom CSS or per-element styling at all for that matter.
It’s great for simplicity, pretty much anyone is able to work on the website, but what we’ve found is that we want our website to be more unique and represent our team better, and Google Sites isn’t capable of this. I personally use self-hosted Wordpress, and it’s significantly more capable than Google Sites is, even without installing any plugins. The current plan is to use it or a similar CMS to make it easy for new members to update the website.
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