Google Sites Gets a Brand-New Template Gallery

Google is going all-out in the enterprise front, constantly updating and adding new features to the Google Apps suite it offers businesses. Now it's launching a new template gallery for Google Sites, the service which allows users to easily create and maintain a website. Anyone can install and use themes available in the public gallery, but businesses can also set up a private section to share templates at the workplace.

“The rate that businesses are adopting Google Sites has surpassed our expectations, and templates will make Sites even more useful by dramatically reducing the time it takes to set up collaborative workspaces like employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites and employee profile pages. Templates let you quickly start a new site with pre-built content, embedded gadgets, page layouts, navigation links, theming and more,” Scott Johnston, Google Sites product manager, wrote.

The company launched Google Sites a couple of years ago to enable users with no technical know-how to build their own websites. Anyone can use the stand-alone service, but the real target here is businesses that get it as part of the Google Apps suite. This allows them to deploy internal website or wiki for various tasks and also allows individual employees to create their own sites if they need to.

Creating the websites was easy enough before, but Google also wants to give users some styling options with the new template gallery. The public gallery has several templates for various general uses like schools, restaurants, projects, and so on. Their selection is a little thin for the time being, but all of the basics are covered. However, this won't last for long as Google is allowing users to upload their own templates to the service. In addition, Google is allowing businesses and organizations to create their own private templates and share them among coworkers using the Sites API, launched almost two months ago.