Weebly v Google Sites

Today I worked on creating a district webpage for our technology department. Since we are a Google school district, we felt it was important to use Google Sites to create the website. This would serve a few purposes.

First, it would give me a chance to work with Google Sites and learn all of the ins and outs of the tool. I used Weebly in my classroom as a teacher, and absolutely loved it. It was intuitive, utilized drag and drop technology for ease of use, and was completely free. I actually had all of my students also use Weebly to create their own websites for my class. So I felt I needed a hands on experience with Sites.

Secondly, it would serve as a modeling tool for the teachers that I work with. My new job as a tech coach allows me to work with literally hundreds of staff members, and I wanted to have our district page as an example of what could be created using the tools that the district supports.

This has proved to be much more difficult than I expected. Largely due to the complexity of the web page that I envision for our department, but also because I am finding that Sites is not as intuitive as the rest of the Google products that I have used.

This is still a work in progress, and while there was plenty of "venting" today about this product, I believe that the more I work with it, the more I can wrap my head around what a final product will end up looking like. Even though it will be limited compared to the sites I have seen created in Weebly.

We'll see how this goes...

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