Selecting a Niche or Topic for your Website or Blog

If you are writing for websites like Squidoo or Hubpages you don't really need to worry about your niche since the focus is on writing pages and linking them as series. Although it would probably be best to write one series at a time so the topic will be fresh instead of skipping around different topics. However when starting a new website or blog there are a few questions that you should ask yourself before registering a new domain name or setting up the structure of your website.
If you have no idea where to start, make a quick list of things you are interested in reading about, your favorite activities, and things you enjoy talking about in conversations with friends, colleagues, and family. Then ask yourself the following questions.

• Can you consistently write about that topic every day for a month or every other day for a year without repeating an article or post topic?
• Is this a topic I enjoy?  Can I share my passion for the topic with my readers?
• Can this topic be monetized?  Are there products or services related to this topic that I can link to?
• Can I add to this topic something unique?
• Do I have experience in this area that I can share?

Can you consistently write about that topic (niche) every day for a month or every other day for a year without repeating an article or post topic?

If you can't come up with a list of things to write about for the topic, then perhaps the niche is too focused for you or it is something that you are not very interested in. Try brainstorming or mind mapping the topic. You could find that your list of writing ideas is huge. Perhaps you could focus your niche even more. Your traffic would be even more focused, but you also might find yourself needing another site because you want to write about related areas. Remember each domain costs money to register and renew and each site requires some setup and maintenance. 

Is this a topic (niche) I enjoy?  Can I share my passion for the topic with my readers?

Perhaps you just love making money online so you don't care if you are writing about topics that you haven't heard of. For most of us though we love being able to share our knowledge, experience and hopefully passion for the topic.

If you only have one pair of shoes then you are probably not very passionate about them and most likely don't have much to say about shoes. Can you fake passion? Pretend that you love the shoes you are writing about? I'd guess that most site visitors won't be very motivated. 

Can this topic be monetized?  Are there products or services related to this topic (niche) that I can link to?

Some topics will be harder to monetize than others. Certain keywords will work for higher paying ads like for financial and banking services whereas other topics might only earn a few cents at most. 

Perhaps a topic won't work well for contextual advertising but there are many products you could feature that are related for affiliate sales.

Can I add something unique to this topic (niche)?

This is probably the most difficult question to ask and answer. To be honest for every somewhat profitable topic you'll probably find dozens of great sites, hundreds of ok sites, and thousands of affiliate only websites. What can you add to the conversation? What will separate you from the crowd and bring you to the front page at Google or get people to sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your RSS feed?  

What unique perspective or information can you contribute?

Do I have experience in this area that I can share?

If you have experience in the topic you'll save quite a lot of time researching for a new article. If you have enough experience, you might be able to write from memory or tell stories! We always love a good story. It will help the visitor get to know you and see your personality. Perhaps the visitor will be able to relate to your idea and will trust you even more.

Working from Home: What's your focus selling or helping?

When I started on my internet journey about four years ago, my goal was to help. I wanted to help people looking for my services find me online and contact me easily. I also wanted to provide my English students with quality content and resources for learning English . My goal wasn't to make money at all.

Of course my students found the site useful and they gave me feedback on it as well including topics they wanted to learn more about so I spent extra time (unpaid) to add that content. Although they were enjoying the site and using it for taking tests I was worried since it was a big expense for me. You may not think about $10-20 dollars a month for hosting is much, but it adds up fast when you don't have a formal job and what about when they cancel classes? How will I maintain the site then?

That's about the point I got sidetracked. I added Adsense, saw my traffic increase as I added original content, and saw about 5 or 6 dollars at the end of the first complete month. I was excited, but I wondered what I could do to actually earn enough to make it worth enhancing the site with more material. Just meeting the hosting and perhaps the domain renewal costs didn't seem like enough since I was spending a couple hours a day researching each topic before writing since they were mostly English grammar and vocabulary pages.

I started experimenting with different ad systems some of which don't even exist today. Then I learned about affiliate marketing and learned how to program in PHP with to set up datafeeds of related products. When Sales started to roll in on my product pages I was excited. No it wasn't a huge amount, but it was enough to get excited.

It wasn't much later that Google revised its ranking system to reduce in ranking affiliate sites that used product datafeeds so all that time spent on learning how to add feeds to my sites was wasted and sites with feeds (normally as a page link in the menu bar) dropped in ranking including all the original content.  I admit I got depressed and frustrated and gave it a break for about a year and a half. The only thing I did was drop many of my experimental sites as their domain registration came up for renewal.  I knew content should be my focus, but I've always been afraid of writing. I really am a little embarrassed by my writing quality so I was always hesitant.
When I had created those experimental niche sites I was planning on using my income from the sales to pay experts to write articles on those topics, but since everything dropped, I was almost ready to give up.

A few months ago I started re-evaluating my online activities and my goals. What do I want to do with my websites? What is their purpose?  Do I want to be a sales person or do I want to help others?  I realized that a big part of why I stopped working on my sites for a few months is that I wasn't helping with the changes and my original reason was to help my students.

What about you? Are you helping others with the content on your websites or are you just pushing and pre-selling products? Sure, selling is creative and great, but I'll now leave product catalogs to the merchants and the affiliates who are lucky enough to have "authority sites" or who want to rewrite all the product descriptions one by one.

The new changes in search engine rankings come at the right time for me. Now I have a chance to start ranking for keywords that were dominated by the content farms. Think about the change as an opportunity to express and share your passions.

What about me? I'm going back to my passion for teaching English (on and off-line), sharing my mistakes, and what I learn about online business. I also take breaks from that to work on my visual artwork which I sell online at Zazzle and other sites because I love creating art. it is my other passion.

What's your focus selling or helping others?

Working from Home: Stay Comfortable in your Home Office

While you might not exactly have a home office as a separate room, it is very important to be comfortable while you work. Being uncomfortable while working is distracting. An uncomfortable work area can be distracting and it may also shorten your attention span.

In ideal circumstances, your home office should be a separate room with a door you can bolt from the inside with plenty of natural light and space for all your work equipment and storage.
If you don't have the room, but you own your own home, you might want to consider remodeling a room or adding a room, but not many of us have the money.
Check your budget to see what you can do to make your home office as comfortable as possible.

There are several basic things that are not very expensive (as office expense go) that will make a big difference.

• A medium or large desk 
• A fan for the floor and a smaller one for your desk
• A large computer display
• A bookcase (or install shelves in a wall)
• A comfortable executive chair
• A file cabinet
• A shelfing unit with large boxes or baskets (if you can afford them)
• A CD or MP3 player with speakers.
• A large bottle of water (several liters)
• A desk or table lamp

I suppose many of these items seem silly to many of you, but they will make a big difference.  While you might not think a file cabinet or a bookcase is related to comfort, but an unorganized office with papers and books all over is not a very comfortable place to work even for those of us who have the tendency to have disorder need a place for books and papers when a guest or potential client stops by. Even if books are not central to your work, you might have some that you use for reference like a good dictionary like the Merriam-Webster's Everyday Language Reference Set. If you live in a large city you might have a book with maps of the different neighborhoods, and of course you need a place to keep your telephone directory.

If you teach private classes, you'll need a place to keep your teacher books, grammar books, extra student textbooks and extra file cabinet space for worksheets you made yourself and student grade records.

 

A large piece of furniture with boxes or baskets to match is great for those who work with crafts, traditional art media (for paint, brushes, supports, frames, art paper, etc.), or photographers who do many still life displays (you need a place to store props). If you are a business consultant, your needs will probably be more in a large book case and a large file cabinet, you won't have that much stuff to organize.

If you do most of your work online you'll still need at least a 2 drawer file cabinet for official documents, receipts, tax documents, etc. You don't want them to get ruined, and you'll want them available on a minutes notice.  Yes, there are cheap racks, but those are really a temporary solution. 

The size of desk really depends on how  you work. If you do everything at your desk, need to scan and print,  a place for a drawing tablet, or other large items, then go for as large a desk that will fit. If you prefer to be on a laptop or mostly write, then a large desk really isn't necessary. You'll only need it for when the sofa is occupied or someone stops buy to see how you work.  

It is important when working from how to give the look of professionalism when someone has an appointment  for business purposes even if you normally work in your boxer shorts at the kitchen table. You should at least give the impression that you are a pro earning good money. Plus having a comfortable work area will give you a more professional attitude. When you walk to your comfortable office it will set your mood for the day.

The fans are of course for hot days. Once fan is often not enough to circulate the air. The desk fan is for keeping you cool. Fans are also good for covering some noisy-neighbor noise. Have the other fan push air toward an open window.

A CD or MP3 player is also great when playing background music to cover some outdoor distractions.  I especially love to play Enya while I work. I find her music very relaxing. 

A comfortable executive chair and large computer display are pricier items, but they will make the biggest difference while you work. Larger monitors will let you work longer without tired eyes and at higher resolutions you can fit more on screen so you'll have less switching back and forth between applications.  The large executive chair will help you avoid backaches and you won't need to get up and walk around quite so often. These two will help you concentrate on your work.

A desk lamp is important for reading if you work early in the morning or in the evening. Try to position your desk so that you have sufficient natural light for working normal hours, but at the same time avoid glare on your computer display.

Working from Home: Automate Social Networking Updates

While most of our creative tasks require our personal attention and can be made faster only through careful planning of our activities, however the boring task of sharing links to your most recent blog post or web site article can be automated quite easily if RSS feeds are created.

RSS is a common tool which allows anyone to read a site's articles or a summary of articles and click through the feed link back to the original page on the site or blog. You fortunately don't need to learn how to create an RSS feed since all the major blog applications create RSS feeds for you. You don't have to do anything to them.

Automating posts to social networking and social media sites vary. You will either need to add the blog URL, blog RSS feed URL, or some other option in the social site to set it up.
Twitterfeed

An alternative that I prefer for both Facebook and Twitter is http://twitterfeed.com/. It only posts text links, but for anything except artwork posts that works fine.  Set up a Twitter account and your Facebook fan pages.

Join Twitterfeed. Add a new feed on their dashboard, select the options you want and it will automatically post a link to the most recent X entries for the period of time you select starting at thirty minutes.  You also have the option of having it use your bit.ly account for the shortened links so you can see how many clicks a link actually got!  I normally don't bother with that, but it is nice to know that I could look that information up.

For each feed you add to Twitterfeed, you can have it post to one or more twitter accounts and one or more Facebook pages (or your Facebook profile). Therefore if you have a Facebook Fan page about race cards and a blog about Nascar races and a twitter account, you could have both updated with your new blog post about Nascar without having to log in to each site and post links. It is great to be able to save time posting, and spend that time reading replies and commenting on friend's profiles and fan pages.

RSS Graffiti
For posting new artwork and graphic design to Facebook pages (or your Facebook profile) I recommend http://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/ RSS Graffiti.  It is an app you add to your Facebook profile or Facebook Fan Pages and configure directly. If your RSS feed includes an image, it should get included in the update!  Since Twitterfeed doesn't include images I prefer RSS Graffili app for updates from my Zazzle feeds. Who wants to see a link to an artwork without a preview image?

There are other resources online for updating to Twitter and Facebook as well as other websites, but I couldn't get most of the others I tried to do anything!

Working from Home:Prioritize your home office activities

I mentioned previously how important it is to consider the days of the week and hours your work at home schedule includes, but it is just as important to properly prioritize your home office activities and other daily tasks.

I'm not referring to meeting potential clients for freelance work or telecommuting since those situations depend on external forces.  You have to determine a time that works both for you and the potential client whereas telecommuting depends on what your boss tells you.

For the rest of us, people who are paid by task, affiliates, web-publishers, bloggers, visual artists and designers (when not working on a commissioned project), etc., It is essential to prioritize your business's tasks in order of productivity.

Other than perhaps showering, eating so you aren't hungry, and preparing your coffee, those who are most productive in the morning or early morning should go right into their most productive task.  If you are a blogger, start writing posts or brainstorm a new post.  An artist might start by processing another photo for upload. The focus should be on adding new content and submitting it to where ever it should go for publishing or sale.
Make your goal having something of quality to show for your work before the distractions start and your energy level drops.

Put less productive activities lower on your list and spend less time on them.  Checking e-mail message, viewing web statistics to see how many visitors you get, etc. can be fun, but it isn't very productive.  You'll get those messages and those visits whether or not you check your Analytics account!   Sure there are things to check for statistics like keywords and popular content on your site, but your efforts to create new content and keep everything up-to-date should be your priority.



If you aren't sure where to start, make a list of what you do as you do them for a couple days. Then review the list check the ones that are productive and think of them as a to do list to keep by your desk.

Prioritizing your home office activities also saves you time. You could easily accomplish in 4-6 hours what would take 8-10 hours just working as the mood moves you wasting time on unproductive activities.

Working from Home: Determine the Best Days of the Week

I mentioned earlier that it is important to determine the hours of the day that you are the most productive in order to avoid distractions from indoors and outdoors, but what about days of the week?

Working from home normally means that you are self employed, are a freelancer, work for a company completing projects by different due dates, or you are a telecommuter. In the last case you are limited, but in the others it is best to determine when the best schedule will be for you to me the most productive.

I've discovered that my rude and noisy neighbors are even worse from Friday to Sunday so on the week end I will only work during brief breaks in the noise. Even now, at 9:30 am on Tuesday I hear a strong bass beat coming through the walls (probably 2 homes down) so you just have to imagine what it is like on the weekend.


Take into consideration your own situation. If you have children living with you, they might be a huge distraction on the weekend unless they go visit grandma or their aunt.  Are there certain days when you have fewer conflicts with your time?   Perhaps you can take turns baby sitting with a neighbor so you both can work the other days.
Determine which days of the week are best for you set a schedule of days and hours and let those you live and work with when you'll be available for work issues and for fun.

Working from Home: Find your most productive time of day

Do you work from home? I started working from home about 3 years ago. While I will still teach one or two private English courses, I'm only away from home 2 days a week and the rest of the time I work from home, writing posts, doing site maintenance, taking photos, processing them, etc.

Today, I want to share my thoughts on WHEN to work when working at home. We know that a typical work day has very little real productive time for most of us.



When you work in an office you spend much of your time in meetings, checking e-mail, and writing reports. Working from home also has its many time wasters. Some of them, like checking e-mail are the same or worse.  Working from home means putting up with noisy neighbor children screaming a few meters away and neighbors playing loud music. If you share a home with your family or with a roommate to save money, you'll find that they often don't understand the concept of working from home and feel that you are just playing and they'll express that as resentment or say that you need to do more chores since you work at home.

The point is that while working from home, it is often just as challenging to try to get any work done unless you live alone in the country! My first suggestion for working at home is to find the best time of day where you can be productive and with the fewest distractions so you can get the most work done in that time so if you are a writer, when can you get the most writing completed?  If you are painter, when can you get the most progress on a painting without interruption?

I've discovered that as long as my roommate doesn't take the day off work, I get the most done in the morning as soon as I wake up and work until the neighbors start screaming and playing loud music and at that time my day is ruined, but if I can write a few good posts or process a few images in that time at least I was able to get something done. It makes the most sense to check my e-mail, Facebook, forums, and other websites after I do my productive tasks that require concentration.

How to use your Gmail or Google Apps e-mail with IMAP or POP

When you set up your Google Apps account for a domain to include e-mail there are several steps involved. It is still a little flaky (sometimes it doesn't connect), but it is nice to be able to add various e-mail accounts to one program like Thunderbird or Outlook Express and see everything.  If you have a regular Gmail account just skip the first part which is for using your own domain in the email address via Google Apps.

I assume that you've already added your domain to Google Apps. At this point I'll assume you'll want to set up e-mail for the domain administrator (which you selected on registration). You can add more users in Google Apps and you'll need to go through the gmail specific steps for each one.

To have email work for your Google Apps domain you'll need to set up the MX records with your domain name registrar's control panel. If you are with Godaddy and you were using the domain with a different host, be sure to "park" the domain and wait a few minutes the go back in to the domain manager for your domain to edit the zone file.
Here is the table from one of the Google help pages. However another says to set the priority to 10,20,30,40,50 instead of 1,5,5,10,10 so it really doesn't matter.
in the MX records add the first one and if your domain registrar lets you add the others. Set the time to update to around an hour, but again that really isn't crucial.

1	ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
5	ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
5	ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
10	ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM
10	ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM

For e-mail for Google Apps you only need to change the MX records. However if you are wanting to use Google Sites or Blogger custom domain option you'll also change the CNAME record for www (or blog, etc)  to ghs.google.com and make the corresponding changes in your Blogger blog or Google Sites settings. I already wrote a post about that on this blog.

Save the settings and go to the Google Apps email page to verify everything. The Google Apps set up also mentions the settings for mx records so no problem. The important thing is to get the servers added.
After everything is saved you'll have to wait a while for the DNS records to populate for the gmail account to actually work.

Now go into gmail. gmail.google.com or mail.google.com both seem to work. Log in with your Google Apps user name and password. If you are logged in with your regular account you'll need to log out first.

On your first gmail log in you'll have to accept the user agreement. Next go to settings. It is either at the top of the new e-mail message display or at the top right corner of the page.
After clicking on Settings go to "Forwarding and POP/IMAP". Enable either POP or IMAP and click on "save changes".

At this point, you'll need to configure your e-mail client software.
Your user name is your complete email address.
The password is the password for the user.

For outgoing e-mail use:
smtp.googlemail.com
port:465
use SSL/TTS


For incoming e-mail use:

IMAP:
imap.gmail.com

Use SSL: Yes
Port: 993

POP:
pop.gmail.com

Port: 995
Port for TLS/STARTTLS: 587
Port for SSL: 465

Google Sites limits you to 5 new sites per week.

Today, I learned something new. You can only "create" 5 new Google Sites per week.  No, I didn't create 5 new sites this week. In fact I have 5 sites in total (and one is just a template of another site set to private).

I created two new real sites and 3 if you count the private separate site. ( you can't make a site a template unless it is public so I just copied a site and set it as private).

You may ask what happened. Well, I created one site, but I didn't like the name so I deleted it and recreated it so it counted as two.  The other site I had created I tried with another template first, but I didn't like the template so I had recreated it. Yes, that also counts as two sites created so when I tried to create another site to move another over from self hosting, I got the following error

"Sorry you can not create more sites at this time"

It appears to be a common error for many. On a Google Sites help page it says that you have reached the limit for site creation for the week and to wait a few days and it should work.  It goes on to state that the current limit is 5 sites per week. Since I don't have more than 5 sites in total and two were created more than a week ago, it is obvious that the "new site" count is not reduced when a site is created and deleted right away.


It really doesn't bother me if this is the case since most people have no need to do five a week (nor do I), but it would have been nice if there were a warning on the add new site page or perhaps a message saying the exact problem like "you have reached the limit of new sites (5), you may create another on <date>" . If I had a message like that I would have thought ok, no biggie.  Anyway if you decide to try Google Sites it is good to know that if you create and delete a few times, you may have to take a week off to work on other projects.

Adding a Contact Form to Blogger and Google Sites

As I've made the switch from Self-hosted WordPress to Google's Blogger and Google Sites (still making the switch for several sites), I've had to learn a new way of doing things, workarounds, and accepting that somethings are not possible.

One issue that I discovered was the lack of a contact form (or any forms) for Blogger and Google Sites. With WordPress, I had installed one of several good third party plugins that would email whatever address was set with the form info. It was a bit of set up, but it all worked ok.

Since Blogger has few plugins and Google Sites only accepts Gadgets, it seemed difficult until I realized that I could embed a Google Docs form to either Blogger or Google Sites.

If you have a Google account, go to Google Docs and create a new form, add questions, make required the questions that are important like e-mail and name, save it and then embed the iframe code in a new page in Blogger or Google Sites.

To get notifications, view the form in Google Docs so you see the spreadsheet (results) view. To the right in the menu bar, click on SHARE and then SET NOTIFICATION RULES.

In the new pop-up, select the check box (or tick it if you prefer!) "A user submits a form"

You have the option below that for "right away" or "daily digest". If you get a lot of spam in your form, change it to daily digest.

The form at Google Docs could be more useful than a plugin if you have several related websites where people might contact you for the same information. You could use the same form on all of those related sites and have the contact information in the same spreadsheet.

Of course you could also make a form in Google Docs for other things like polls and surveys.

The only bad thing about the forms is the lack of an option to upload attachments so if you need to get a document either have them submit the url or tell them you'll send them a message so they can reply with the attachment. It is possible that you could accept an attachment though a Google Gadget attached to a form, but I haven't yet experimented with those options.
Click on my Contact Us page to see my Google Form.

Setting up custom domain for Google Sites Site AND Blogger Blog

The last couple days I've been experimenting and testing even more. Since I've gotten used to Blogger and had finished importing my blog posts from visualartgitfs.com which was on Self-hosted Wordpress to visualartgifts.blogspot.com and due to the fact that my first Google Site was getting complicated (no javascript on G.S.!), I took a break from that site yesterday and today to finish moving my visual art site.

If you remember my previous posts on the topic, I didn't know what to do since my site had many more than the 10 page limit in Blogger. I had changed a few to posts and linked them to a page, but that didn't feel right.  It finally came to me. I'd make my pages into a Google Site.
Everything seemed to click since I didn't need javascript for my posts. It was just busy work. I still have to recreate the forms for visual artist interview and profiles which I can do in Google Docs, but other than that I was ready for the next challenge.

Setting up custom domains for Blogger and Google Sites was actually quite easy. Here's what I did.

1. In GoDaddy (where I had registered my domains but not hosted the site) I set the domain to parked.
2. After a minute or two I was able to go back in and edit the CNAME info.
3. I added a CNAME for "blog" and "ghs.google.com"
4. I changed the CNAME entry for "www" and used "ghs.google.com" again.
5. I went back to the domain settings in the domain manager and told it to forward to www.visualartgifts.com so I don't get an error if I type the domain without www.
6. I went to Blogger's Dashboard and went to Settings for the site and set the custom domain. I clicked on the option for advanced setting since I already have a domain and told it to use blog.visualartgifts.com
7. I went to my Google Site's Manage Site link and under Site Settings there's the option for Web Address.  There I told it to use www.visualartgifts.com.

FYI - I entered the data without quotes!

Then I had to be patient
At that point I just had to wait a while for the domain name server information to update until then I would see my old site hosted on HostGator.  You may still see the old site, but it has already updated for me. It usually takes around 24 hours for that information to update so don't panic if you make changes and it doesn't work.

My biggest doubt would be what would happen to internal and external links to both the Blogger blog which has been up for days and the Google Sites address. I had already added both to Google Webmasters and their Sitemaps so I know that some pages were already in the index.

Links still work
I am happy to report that my internal links and external links pointing to the old non-custom URL/domains all worked as before.  In fact if I go to the blogspot address for the blog, I get redirected to blog.visualartgifts.com but the same page.  If I click on a link to a blog page with the blogspot URL it takes me to the right page with the custom domain.

The Google Site pages load all the images with the "old" links to the uploads and in this case the pages load both ways. I'd rather have it redirect, but happy everything works as is!

Google Apps Email Integration is Separate
Finally if you use Google Apps for your domain you can use Gmail free using your own email address on your domain. It looks like you have a complete hosting account to the world, but you only pay for your domain name registration and renewals. Setting up Google Apps for email requires separate steps. They aren't related, but it requires editing your MX records. I'll write a post about that later.

In summary I went from:
http://visualartgifts.blogspot.com  to   http://blog.visualartgifts.com
and from
https://sites.google.com/site/visualartandartists/  to  http://www.visualartgifts.com
If I later decide I don't want the domain name, I can replace it with a different one or go back to the free host domain.

Sitemaps for Google Sites

One concern of mine in setting up a site on Google Sites is setting up a sitemap or an RSS feed. While I've only seen information on RSS Feeds for site "announcements", there is a sitemap already in place even though the information isn't on display in a Google Site management page.

To add a Sitemap to Google Webmasters, go through the normal steps for adding a domain. Select the option for metatag for verification. There is a place in the general settings to paste the code.

After your Google Site is verified add "/system/feeds/sitemap" to the field for the sitemap URL. Now you have your sitemap added for your Google Site. 
You'll probably have to wait a few days for the system to tell you how many URLs from your sitemap are in the index, but at least Google Webmaster will be aware of your pages for more complete crawling.


The full URL for your feed is your normal URL + the /system/feeds/sitemap
so you'd have one of the following depending on whether you set up your site from Google Sites via your Google account or Google Apps.

http://sites.google.com/site/YourSite/system/feeds/sitemap

http://sites.google.com/a/AppDomain/YourSite/system/feeds/sitemap




Google Sites First Impressions

I've been testing the use of Google Sites as an alternative for hosting for my English language learning site. If successful I'll cancel my hosting and move there, but right now it is a test to learn what can and can't be done with a free Google site.

First I read that affiliate links are not allowed however Google Adsense ads are permitted so that doesn't really bother me. I'm sure I'll get a few clicks on ads.

The next problem is that there is no ability to use PHP and mysql.  That doesn't really surprise me since since I can't think of any free site that would allow that.

The thing that surprised me the most is that Iframes and javascript are not allowed so I can't use my favorite javascript/fash combo audio players and game scripts unless I can figure out how to add them as Gadgets. That's still a little over my head right now.

As far as using audio files on a Google Sites website, I read about using the Google Reader flash embed code. I was surprised to see that it was accepted. Perhaps it allows scripts that are hosted by Google?

Anyway, at the moment I'm seeing if it will let me upload all my old-site audio files as attachments to later use with the Google Reader player. I suppose I could also store the files on Google Docs, but I want to try this way first.

As for the positive aspects, I like how it will automatically update a subpage list. When I select the option to add a subpage list, it asks me which page to show a subpage listing of. I can change the title of the list. As I add pages below the page I made the list for, the subpage list gets updated.

I really like that feature since one of the most annoying part of making a non-blog website is updating the page lists and menus.

If you are interested in Google Sites and other Google Apps services you might be interested in this book:

Add Google Analytics Tracking to Google Sites Website

If you have a Google Sites websites and you'd like to add website tracking to learn more about what pages are being visited and non-personal stats about your website visitors like the operating system, browser, or screen resolution ( to help you make your site more useable),  go to MORE ACTIONS menu and select MANAGE SITE. After the page loads select GENERAL (under Site Settings). There is a box to check and a field to post your Google Analytics ID.  Don't forget to click save!

Adding AdSense to your Google Site - Google Sites Help

I have yet to try it but I found this help page for how to add Adsense to a Google Site. It has a video and in text the basic steps to follow.

More Actions -- Manage site -- Monetize -- Monetize this site

Adding AdSense to your Google Site - Google Sites Help

Update:
I followed the instructions to add my existing Adsense account and the button to monetize didn't work. I modified the home page and the about me page and then the button worked so if you want to monetize your Google Sites site, be sure to edit the pages first!

New Test: Google Sites

On my quest to see if I can switch from self-hosted websites to free services like those on Google Apps, I'm adding to my test with a new site on Google Sites.  Since you can't have more than 10 pages on Google Blogger and I'm looking for a place to host English Quizzes and tests that are on my language learning site when I cancel my hosting acccount in a couple months I decided to start a site in Google Sites and see if it will let me do some of what I want.
I am sure it won't have any database access for php scripts to save scores, etc., but I am hoping that I'll be able to post javascript based quizzes and activites.  I'll be adding posts to this blog describing what I tried to do and what worked (or didn't).  If I find a work-around I'll post about that too. The URL for my test Google site is https://sites.google.com/site/learnandpracticeenglish/

So far I went to Google sites, choose a name, selected a template, a type of site (classroom), and filled in a captcha code.  It loaded a page with preloaded information so I'll start experimenting. :-)

It looks like redirects and affiliate links are not allowed, but Adsense is allowed (no surprise there really) so I'll probably first try to get Adsense set up on it.

Do you have a Google Site? What do you like and dislike about it?

I see there is a limit of 100 megabytes in Site storage I am curious if that is per site or for all sites under an account.