The Ultimate Guide to Get your website live in just 15 minutes with Google Sites

We all know how important online presence is in the current times. It is imperative to have your presence across social platforms and also to have your own website whether it is for your personal portfolio, a startup idea or just a prototype to do the market research. Let’s explore how you can get your website live in just 15 minutes.

Once you decide to create your website, the first question that comes to mind is that how to get the website live. In this article, we will discuss that how can you get your new website live in less than 15 minutes without any hosting cost. You just need to pay for your domain name.

Let’s create a new website.

Decide on the domain name

The first thing you need to decide is the name of your website and it should be unique. The name of the domain depends on the purpose of your website, it can be on your name if it is your personal website or if you already have a business you can create a website with that name or any other name that fits and represent the idea and content of your website.

The domain name should be unique and available which means that it should not have been already registered by someone else.

Check availability and buy the domain

Once you have decided the name of your website the next step is to check if that name is available. To check that you can go to https://domains.google and put the domain name you desire to buy. It should tell you if that name is available or not.

If the domain name is available, you will see the below screen on the next page.

You can see that the domain is available for $12/year and you have different options available like .com, .net. .org etc. You can choose any of these, based on your need. The price can vary based on the domain name’s demand.

You can now add this to your cart and check out with your desired payment method.

Design and add content to your website

Now you already have your desired domain name for the website, the next step is to connect this domain to an actual website. For this purpose, you can choose Google sites to create a website free of cost.

You can go to http://sites.google.com/ and choose a template based on your website’s suitability. There are many templates available for personal portfolio, event, help centre, project, education etc.

You can choose any of them and then update the content to reflect data related to your website. After you choose the template, the portal will take you to the ‘website builder’ if we can call it so. Here you will have templates, components and many other things to build your website. The components and tools available are discussed in the next section.

You have a lot of options available here to give your website a nice design.

You can add a number of components from the options available. Images, textboxes, code, layouts, documents, slides and many more. You can even embed the custom HTML code, for example, you can embed a real-time Twitter feed or a single tweet in a section of the website.

There are options to arrange your content in certain layouts like a combination of images and text.

Other cool options are to add the slides, Google Docs, google sheets directly from your google drive to the website.

You can preview the changes locally before publishing the website.

Publish to make it Live

Once you are happy with the changes you can publish your website by clicking on the ‘Publish’ button in the top right corner.

It will let you compare the current changes with the previous website before the final publish.

Congrats! your website is live now. You can visit the domain name you bought earlier and the website will be available at that address.

In the last post we had discussed about How to Auto Start Spring Boot application after code changes in IntelliJ Idea. You can read that post here.

Happy Learning!