Managing Your Business Website with Google for Work

Is your website all that you need it to be? How about your company intranet? Check out Google for Work’s Forms and Sites offerings to see how your experience could be even better.

We’ve talked quite a lot about websites over the past few years. Do you really need them? (Yes.) Are yours up to date?

We’ve answered these questions, and we’ve even told you what to include on your site. But there’s one thing we haven’t talked about: How to get your site online and working well for your business.Since this post is part of a series about Google products, of which we’re big fans, we won’t be conducting an exhaustive review of website hosting services. There are lots of good ones out there, but what we will talk about is how Google for Work’s Sites and Forms can help your website.

Managing Your Intranet and Internet with Google Sites

You can manage your company’s intranet — basically, a private website or network that is used only by your employees — with Google Sites. Not only does this keep your vital information in one place, it's easy to access and customize. (Incidentally, it's also a great place to deploy Google Search.) And you don't have to have a web developer on call; no coding is needed with these intuitive tools.  

There's another way you can use Sites to manage your information — project and team sites. Rather than posting all information on your company intranet, you can create smaller, private sites for specific projects. Like other Google tools, you get to control which of your team members has access to which areas of the site.

Now, let's turn our attention to the internet — or at least to that particular slice of it where your public website resides.

Again, you can customize the look and feel of your site with Google Sites without coding a single line of HTML. And you can integrate your Google-backed site with other tools, such as Google Calendar, Maps, and Search.  In fact, you can integrate another Google tool with your website: Google Forms.

Like Sites, Google Forms can be used to gather information from inside and outside your company. Using Forms, you can create customized surveys and questionnaires in much the same way as you would a Word document — well, maybe with a bit more dragging and dropping of elements. You can set up the questions and response types you'd like and even add video and images to drive the point home.Once the data starts pouring in, everything can be tabulated in Google Sheets.

Or, if you'd rather not wait, you can see the results in real time from the summary view. And, like other Google Apps, this is readily shareable.

There’s no doubt that Google for Work is a useful product for any business. It doesn’t even matter what operating system you use for these web-based tools. If you’re looking for something that’s lightweight, portable, and budget-friendly, you just might want to consider Google’s Chrome OS.