Skill: Create and Publish a Website

9.5 Skill - Create and publish your own websites

Required

One way to communicate with the world is to build your own website. It has become so easy to do, not only to build your website, but to have it published on the internet, too. There are many companies that allow you to create a free website, using tools that require no knowledge of html coding, and they will even host it on the internet for you free. Below are several of the websites one of our faculty members, Nathan Smith, has created and published. Feel free to go explore any of them (each image below links). He used Weebly.com (Links to an external site.) until the new Google Sites (Links to an external site.) arrived - and now he's switched over to that.

Your task this week is to create and publish your own website. For this week, we will show you how to do this in your Google Drive (Links to an external site.) - using Google Sites (Links to an external site.). Google Sites doesn't limit you on how many free sites you can create and publish, or how many pages a website can have. Really, the only limitation is the amount of storage space you have in your Google Drive, and with your AggieMail Google Drive having unlimited storage - you have complete freedom to create as many websites as you want. Another great added feature is that you can insert your Google docs, sheets, slide shows, charts, maps, calendar, and more! Then whenever you update any of those, they are automatically updated on your published website!

Some of you may already have experience creating and publishing a website. That's wonderful because this is a very useful skill for an educator to have. This assignment has two goals - to create and publish a website of your own, and to learn how to use Google Sites. If you've already created a Google site and made it live - do some updating this week that you've needed to do, and submit that to qualify for this assignment. Otherwise, please still go through the Google Sites tutorial (Links to an external site.) - it's an awesome free tool for both you and your future students. Then create and publish a Google Sites website!

Please do not be intimatdated by this assignment. Read the W09 Create a Website instructions thoroughly, we are not requiring too much. It is so easy to do! So don't let this assignment scare you. You'll be amazed at what you can do! Now, work your way through the following tutorial, Create & Publish Your Own Website Using Google Sites.

Expand Your Horizons

Pick at least one to read and explore.

Videos:

Optional Resources

These resources are not required!

Here are some other tutorial helps for WordPress, and JIMDO.

https://www.gcflearnfree.org/wordpress-resources/wordpress-resources/1/ (Links to an external site.)

https://support.jimdo.com/basics/ (Links to an external site.)

Weebly (Links to an external site.) - Weebly is a web-hosting service featuring a drag-and-drop website builder. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. You can create an account and have up to 10 free websites that weebly will host. Weebly's tutorials are at https://hc.weebly.com/hc/en-us (Links to an external site.). The great tutorial at right comes from the Technology for Teachers & Students YouTube Channel

WIX (Links to an external site.) - Wix.com is a cloud-based web development platform that was first developed and popularized by the Israeli company also called Wix. It allows users to create HTML5 web sites and mobile sites through the use of online drag and drop tools. Some WIX tutorials are here

Google Sites (Links to an external site.): Google has a great tool to allow you to create, and publish your own websites for free! It's called Google Sites, and it has upgraded recently to be even more powerful and user friendly. You can either click the link in this paragraph, or go to your Google Drive, click new, and go down to more... In that section you'll see Google Site as an option.

Watch on YouTube

Assignment 9: Create a Website

One way to communicate with the world is to build your own website. It has become so easy to do, not only to build your website but to have it published on the internet, too. There are many companies that allow you to create a free website, using tools that require no knowledge of HTML coding, and they will even host it on the internet for you free. Your task this week is to create and publish a website. For this week, you will learn how to do this in your Google Drive (Links to an external site.) - using Google Sites (Links to an external site.). Google Sites doesn't limit you on how many free sites you can create and publish, or how many pages a website can have. You can insert your Google docs, sheets, slide shows, charts, maps, calendars, and more. Then whenever you update any of those, they are automatically updated on your published website.

Some of you may already have experience creating and publishing a website. That's wonderful because this is a very useful skill for an educator to have. This assignment has two goals - to create and publish a website of your own, and to learn how to use Google Sites. If you've already created a Google site and made it live - do some updating this week that you've needed to do, and submit that to qualify for this assignment. If not, please still go through the Google Sites tutorial (Links to an external site.) - it's an awesome free tool for both you and your future students. Then create and publish a Google Sites website! You should find it an easy assignment to do.

Use the new Google Sites (Links to an external site.) to build, then publish your own website. The classic Google Sites is outdated and much harder to use - avoid that one. You get to the new Google sites by opening a new browser tab and typing in sites.google.com/new (Links to an external site.).

I encourage you to create something of use and value to you as an educator. It may contain lessons you wish to share online. It may be a portfolio of creations you wish to share with the world. You might want to create the beginnings of your future class website. But it doesn't have to be about teaching. As I said earlier, the two-fold purpose for this assignment is 1) to have you prove that you can create a live website, which you can use, and edit whenever you need to, and 2) also to learn how to use the new Google Sites. Make this assignment something of value to you personally - not just an assignment hoop to jump through.

Requirements for this assignment:

Your website needs to have at least two pages that can be easily navigated to.
Your website should contain images, text, and hyperlinks to other online resources. Optionally, you can also include google docs, slide shows, spreadsheets, YouTube videos, etc., into it. The point here is to learn how to do these things.
Make sure it is clean and professional-looking and free of spelling and grammar errors.
Copy the published URL for your website and share it with the rest of the class this Canvas discussion. Be sure in your post to let us know what your website is about, and also to share things you've learned about Google Sites that would help the other students in the class.