Create a Modern Professional Google Website for FREE! (Filmmaker/Photographer/Artist)

hey what's up guys tava here and today i'll be doing a fairly deep dive in how to create a professional google sites website for completely free and i think a lot of people don't realize how to make this and how easy it is to do so that's why i'm gonna be diving into this video a lot of people have also requested this video from a previous google sites tutorial that i made a while back and so this is finally coming to fruition this is going to be that tutorial [Music] i think google sites is a super powerful tool that a lot of people don't realize how powerful it is and it is completely free compared to some of the other free website companies that aren't exactly completely free so google sites is great because you're able to add your own domain completely free of charge if you've paid for that domain and you're able to customize it and update it really frequently and it doesn't have a bunch of that advertising for that specific company like wix or weebly or whatever those other companies are so i really like google sites for how clean you can make it look and how professional it is at the same time so in this tutorial i'm gonna be showing how to create a clean and professional website that basically advertises what you want to represent as yourself or as a brand and basically just get that out there so people can see it and maybe potentially click on it invest in whatever you're doing okay so obviously the first thing we need to do is go to google sites and once you're inside of google sites it's going to look pretty plain but the first thing you're going to do is create a blank site i like to create blank ones because the pre-made ones they just aren't as customizable so we're just going to click blank here and as you can see it's going to load up your new site so from the beginning the site doesn't look great it looks like some of those cheesy sites that you might see teachers have or people just create to have a random site and they don't really put much work into making them look professional so this is our starting point but we can make it look significantly better the first thing i like to do is change the theme and if you go over to themes on the right here you can see you have a couple of choices the theme isn't super important but it allows you to set a specific font as well as a color style so if you click through each theme you can see underneath you can choose the font style and you can see what each font looks like to decide if that's the font style you want to go with your actual site you can always change your site style whenever you want you aren't set in stone with it so it is good to just get creative here and mess around with it but this specific tutorial i think i'm going to take the aristotle theme and then i'm going to choose the font style to be the bold font style because i like how this looks here it's very clean for the color accents which are basically just these little colors here and other places you'll find on the side i think i'm just choose white like the font color i don't really need to be specific but it just makes it look pretty clean so since i'm making this site for myself the page tile is obviously just going to be my name so it's just going to be my name i'm going to have that in all caps here and then underneath if i click enter i can kind of create a subheading so for this let's just get is basically i can get will be a filmmaker i'll be a influencer and a photographer now what i'm going to do is highlight this and then center it in the middle and then i'm going to change it from normal text to heading to make it a bit bolder underneath the main title and now we need to do is get rid of this really ugly picture here that they set by default i have no idea why they said it this way but it really doesn't look great what i like to do for the home page especially if you're an artist or something and you just want to show off who you are is to create a very simple and basic homepage which is represents your kind of theme as an individual so for me this means changing the header type from banner to cover and this is just going to cover the entire front page so when they open the page it's really just going to have a nice image with your title on it very simple and clean and represents what you are now the next step is to change the photo behind here for me i have a lot of sample photos that i use for youtube and other things that are just great banner photos that work well in situations like this but if you don't have them i highly recommend building some to use in places like a website so let's go to upload i have a photo here that i want for my cover image so i'm just going to click on it and click open and then it's going to load inside of the google site and as you can see it looks pretty clean behind here so this is basically the finished home page it's very clean represents who you are has a nice image behind it but one more thing i like to add to the homepage is social media links down at the very bottom below my main title so if they see it and want to click and see what things you've done it's really easy for them to access it i've made a previous tutorial on how to do this which you can check out with the link right here but it's pretty simple to do basically all you're gonna do is load a png image of a logo of basically youtube instagram facebook twitter whatever they are load it into the google sites and then you're gonna basically click on it and add a link to that specific photo so when you click on the photo it takes you directly to that website unfortunately google doesn't have a way to do this built in for social media links so you kind of have to trick the system but it does work very well once you've built it out so again watch that video for some more detail on this tutorial and one more thing to make the site look even cleaner is when you have your logos down here at the bottom for the social medias where they can click on it what i like to do is change the background color and if you go to the backgrounds right here for the sections you can see that the options for the theme are really limited basically you only have three colors which are pretty much all white just different shades of white so what i like to do is go to add an image but instead of uploading the image simply select image go to search which is search google and then i like to search black find a black image select it and then the background is instantly black which looks a lot cleaner in my opinion for the type of style that i usually go for for these websites a few more steps that will really sell your website as professionals adding a favicon as well as a logo so what you can do inside of google sites is right up here on the top left under site title basically name it whatever you want from me it's just going to be my name here but then you're able to add a logo here so if you click add logo you can add brand images so under logo you can upload a logo and it will add it right to the top of your site so it's super easy to see and makes it look more professional and thought out so for me i'm just going to go to logo upload go to my desktop find a specific photo i want and click open and then it's going to open this photo as my logo so this isn't the greatest photo but as you can see it pops up right here in the corner so you can choose whatever photo you want to sit there and really represent your brand another thing that makes your website look even more professional is adding a favicon this is basically the little icon that you see at the top left of browser tab so this little icon right here you can replace inside of google sites to make it whatever you want and really sell your brand even further so just for example let's upload the same picture i just uploaded and you can see that it will update as the favicon which will go in the top corner and then one more super awesome professional thing about google sites is that you can add a custom url for free whereas other sites require you to pay for actually having that url and google sites can add a custom url right here www.yourdomain.com whatever it is you do have to pay for the domain obviously but it is free to assign it to this website inside of google sites which is absolutely awesome for people that want pretty affordable websites okay so we have our homepage done but now we need to make another page for our portfolio so under pages on the right here we're going to go to the bottom click the plus and call it portfolio i'm going to click done and it's going to create another page which you can access by clicking these three little lines over on the side shows the sidebar and allows you to basically go from home to portfolio or whatever page you want so as you can see it creates a page much like the front page but we want to change this we don't want it to look the same so basically what i'm going to do is change the header type from that cover to just a banner so it's a lot smaller but it still shows what this page is about i specifically like to change the image between pages okay so the portfolio i'm just going to choose a random picture of a camera select it and then have it apply to the background for the banner so now you really have flexibility creating this page however you want so from themes we're going to go over to insert and you can see all these different types of things you can insert into your specific page the specific things i like to do are add these built out layouts already so i can basically just click on one of these it inserts a bunch of places where i can add videos or photos and then i can add a title and a description to each of those so if i'm trying to show different video projects i've worked on basically i can add a video of that specific project so if i click here i have the option to add a youtube video and it will actually bring up different projects i've done so in my portfolio if i want to bring up the dp reel that i just made i can search it in the youtube bar click on it and then click select and it's going to add into this part of my portfolio and i can basically say dp real and i can add a description if i wanted to basically saying that oh these are my best shots from the previous year from these projects shot on this camera whatever it is and you can add all these different examples throughout your portfolio so for the second one i could do a video calendar map whatever it is but you like to stick with the same things throughout the portfolio to make it have the most sense and again i really don't like this section background being white here i think it really detracts from the subjects that are trying to be shown on the specific page so again what i'm going to do is go over to the section background image select image go to the search tab search for black click the first black image and then boom that really just makes the whole subject pop a lot better inside of this portfolio page okay so now that i've given you those tips i'm going to finish off this video by showing you my actual google sites website just to give you an example of it in action now the reason i'm not going to be going through an entire website build is because one it takes forever and two google sites is pretty self-explanatory as you can see i mean basically just look around the website at the tools it has get creative with it and you can pretty much come with a good looking outcome there are just a couple things that i touched on that aren't super self-explanatory but hopefully those have been covered now and now i'm going to be showing you my own website and how professional you can make it look for completely free so as you can see this is my finished google sites website it looks like that example we were showing but it's a little bit of a different style but as you can see super simple here cover image name title and then the social media links here at the bottom i did them in black and white with that black background here so if i click on youtube it brings up my youtube account which is super cool so as you can see i have my own custom domain here tavakessler.com is a secure link which is super cool so anyway if we go from the home page i have my youtube page which basically describes what my youtube channel is about and again i use this format where i have the black background and then i have these videos basically laid out with that self laid out structure you can also do it individually but i just like how i can lay out these videos different sizes people can click on them and watch them under portfolio like i described i have that black background and then i have these videos here with these titles and descriptions underneath them so people can easily click on things to see what they're about and i also have different category titles here so i have cinematography editing basically just different sections of my portfolio that people can click on and watch the corresponding videos that represent that kind of style and then at the bottom i just have some photography because why not it's in this kind of cool scroll wheel where you can click through different photos get a good example of what my work looks like on the side i've also created some pages for some more specific pieces of work so in this case they're two documentaries you can click on get a nice cover image and then get a description and watch it with this video link here down below i have an about page which is basically just a description of who i am what i do super simple again with that black background there and then a contact page very last part where it's basically just a google forms that i made inside of google forms connected to the google site and you can fill it out with your name email and question send me a question if you have a question and uh basically you can just submit that and it's super clean it's secure looks nice and again completely free through google sites i know the praise in this video makes it seem like a paid commercial for google sites but it's not at all it's really like their platform and i think it's better than the other free website companies out there because it is built into the google system of things so it comes with google sites as well as youtube as well as gmail all those things that are inside of the google network it's just really nice to have them all concise in one place and you can kind of draw from one to the other and make a nice website of course google sites doesn't have everything you can't customize animations and you can't get super fancy with all the effects that you have inside the website but it is a very good way to make a professional website quickly that you can share with clients and get your name out anyway that's it for today if you like this video be sure to like share and subscribe and i'll see you all next time what about this self-confident girl i guess you really need to be with her [Music] she's so clever and so strong will you really need to

Channel: Tava Kessler

Views: 121,684

Keywords: google, google sites, tutorial, easy, professional, clean, modern, website build tutorial, googles sites tutorial, filmmaker, photographer, artist, clean website for artists, free, all free, google sites tutorial, how to build a website

Id: W1_xz6yDOgE

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/cl4rkc4nt]

Good video, but it's kind of "cheap" for a Google Sites tutorial to be for a filmmaker site. Picture and video content is the easiest way to make a Google Site look "matured" and "occupied", and requires the least amount of ingenuity to figure out how to make Google Sites work for you. And I subscribed, of course.