Create a free website. Really.

1) Navigate to: http://pages.google.com/. Login with your Google account credentials.
2) You will see a welcome screen highlighting some of the features of the service. You need to scroll down and tick the checkbox indicating that you agree to Google’s terms and conditions.
3) Your home page template will open and you can either begin typing content into your page, or change some options to further personalize your page.
4) Your site will not be available online until the first time you click the Publish button. Each time you make changes, you will need to click the Publish button so that your visitors will see the new content.
5) Use the Preview button to see how your site will look once you publish it.
6) The Site Manager page allows you to tune the entire site, add pages, add files, and more.
7) The Help feature will explain things in detail, but the application is so easy, just click on something to see what it does and learn how to use it.

That is really all there is to it. The most difficult part of creating your own website with Google pages will be deciding what kind of content you want to provide to your visitors. As you are learning to build your site with this tool, go to some of your favorite to sites and look at how the content is organized. This will give you some ideas of how you can communicate with your visitors. Deciding what to type – your content – will be your big challenge.

At first, you may not like your site once you’ve designed it. Feel free to change some or all of it. It is your site, and this tool is free. It is designed to allow you a real world canvas to learn and publish a website for everybody – or nobody – to see.

Hint –Navigation controls are an extremely important part of a good site. This package doesn’t provide a navigation toolbar (most of the paid packages will). I like to use the subtitle space of the page to create a consistent set of links to all of the other pages on the site. (This is the area in the page template labeled Click here to enter your page’s subtitle (optional) ).

(Visit http://www.ralphcarlone.com/5.html to view the full content of these instructions.)