Google sites
Google sites is a Google’s service for creating both regular website and mobile website. The builder is available for free and doesn’t require either third party hosting nor software investment.
The service can be handled by users from within their own web browsers and a Google account is needed to run the service.
Our review on Google mobile site builder
Google’s free mobile site builder embeds all necessary features to customize one’s mobisite design. But what makes a difference with Google Sites Mobile is that it offers via its widgets (modules) a full integration of most of Google services (Calendar, YouTube, Google News, Google Wave, Google Checkout, AdSens, Chart, Google Docs, Picasa, etc..).
Google’s free mobile sites builder is very interesting if you are willing to keep your design not too far from default prebuilt templates or if you are willing to invest some time to familiarize yourself with the builder.
By cons, like most of Super-wysiwyg based mobile website builder, further customization is somewhat complicated because design customization tools are tricky to handle. Actually, even a simple module moving may mess up your entire page layout, since you can place elements anywhere in a page from the most relevant place to the most inappropriate one.
Summary
: Free, Collaborative feature, Many available modules, Integrate many other Google Services, m-commerce ready, Prebuilt templates available for many areas of activity.
: No phone emulator for preview, Tricky to use for custom design.
Available mobile features & Modules:
Image, Link, Table of content, Subpage listing, Line, +1 button, Recent post, Recently updated files, Recent list item, Text box, Html box, Adsens, Apps script gadget, Calendar,Chart, All Google documents services, Map, Picasa, Video, Iframe, Clic to Call, Twitter Widget, Paypal, YouTube, Google news show, Google news, RSS feed, Twitter,…
Tutorial
If you are familiar Google Website Builder for regular websites, the user experience is almost the same. The only main differences between the two services are the type of available module and the width of the wysiwyg page editor (smaller for mobile ).
The mobile page editor of Google sites works like MS Word [or any other rich text editor] except that, apart from classical text/image insertion and formatting tools, it also embeds special features (Google Calendar module, Iframe module, Click to call module, Twitter gadget, Checkout module, etc.) dedicated to web and mobile web development.
Whenever the user selects a page of his mobile website, the page will be displayed at full scale within the Google sites wysiwyg editor. To customize it, the user has simply to type his texts and insert his chosen modules at any line within the page.
To speed up workflow, user may as well load prebuilt mobile templates and settle for changing default contents and default modules settings. For that purpose Google Sites Mobile offers a number of ready-to-use templates which cover many areas of activities such as restaurant, local business, social, e-commerce and so on.
Similarly to most mobile website builder Google Sites Mobile automatically builds mobile website navigation menus (At the homepage) by identifying all existing pages.
