Pexica Cloud & Info Tech Services

05/03/2024

People say “Better late than never” so I decided it was time to do something good and join an environmental action group. A new group was being formed in the village where I live and the call went out to people in the area to come along to the first meeting. My conscience ignored the fact that I am far too busy for this kind of thing and kept nagging me to go along. The location was the Wheatsheaf Hotel in Baslow and of course there was beer available and my conscience did mention that fact in the conversation going on in my inner monologue. When the meeting came around, near the end of November 2023, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t get into the room where the meeting took place, such was the turnout. Near the end of the slightly less well-attended second meeting a month later I involuntarily offered to create the website for the group. After all, what else could I offer? I’m not sure I’m any good at planting trees, removing invasive plant species or keeping bees.

I suggested Google Sites for the website as it’s free and by far the most user friendly web platform around. When it’s likely that you are going to have collaborators working on the site, adding content, in my opinion it is the one and only choice at the moment. Not to mention that it’s possible to produce excellent websites using the platform - this is not about being cheap and cheerful.

I created the blank website and began to think about the design. My first step was to search for the websites of similar organisations. Most of them have a main colour of green as you would expect. The standard isn’t great. I looked at around a dozen websites and gave each a rating out of five. None received a top mark and only two were awarded a four out of five. I would expect most voluntary groups don’t have the funds to pay for a web designer; unless they have one in their ranks, the responsibility will be passed on to the least reluctant.

The reason for viewing similar sites is not to simply copy one that you like. It’s to get a feel for what looks good and also some ideas of the type of content to be added. The group does not have a logo, branding or colour scheme. Normally, you are given these elements by a client and it guides you to shaping the theme for the website.

How do you go about the job of creating a theme from scratch when you have hundreds of fonts to choose from and thousands (if not millions) of colours to ponder over? For this project I decided to ask Google’s AI chat thingy, Gemini, for some help and I received expected answers that I already knew. I performed a standard Google search to see what is trending in 2024. While not providing any real answers this did help me come to a decision on fonts and colours. I went with two shades of blue and one of green. However, I really wanted to get a bit of yellow in there - I heard daffodils calling me. I headed on over to Coolors where you can experiment with colours to come up with an entire theme. With some help from my 10-year old daughter (a different pair of eyes and taste in websites) I finally made a decision. In Coolors you can use a visualiser to see what the colours look like in website style.

For text I initially ran with Inter, a relatively new kid on the block. A knowledge of fonts, or at least which ones to use is more important than it may seem. Everyone has heard of Comic Sans and its chronic misuse. The Inter wasn’t really doing it for me so I switched to Noto Sans for the titles and headings and good old Montserrat for normal text.

Anyway, I will see how this goes. By the way, if you’re designing a website, and you’re in the mood for some procrastination, then the world of colours and fonts is a good place to go and do it.

22/02/2024

Fun with Domain Authentication

This blog post stole its title from the name of a Zoom meeting I will be taking part in not long after I send this article zooming around the Internet. It's not an over-egged title of a seminar organised by GoDaddy or some other domain name provider. The meeting is just between me and someone in the USA. The client wants to make MailerLite work so that she can send out email campaigns. This involves adding DNS records to the settings at the website of wherever your domain name is based.

While this all sounds very technical it should be a piece of cake as you are generally given the details of these records by the service provider in this example case MailerLite have provided my client with the following records:

DomainKey Identified Mail (DKIM)
Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
Yes, I know this is not fun. However, these are added to your domain name provider's DNS settings as, respectively, a CNAME record and a TXT record.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the desired outcome is not being achieved, which has led to my involvement.

"Why am I writing about this?" you may ask, if you've made it this far. Well, I have been doing a lot of work recently to review my procedures, processes and workflow (these are all probably the same thing). I've read a lot of advice from my fellow freelancers. As part of my new extensive workflow is an instruction that tells me to write a blog post about a new project that has started. It would have been easy to dismiss this project as it's happening soon and it's going to be quite short but I thought I would test myself. If I can write about this fun subject then surely I can write about anything.

The other reason I wanted to write about this particular event (the Fun with Domain Authentication event) is that the marriage between something like an email marketing tool such as MailerLite and the email system that it wants to link up to (Google Domains and Google Workspace) can be anything but straightforward. Being on a video call with a client where you start to look like some knowledge-less chump definitely isn't fun. However, to know the intricacies of every domain provider and every email marketing tool (or other tools) seems impossible because they all have their little quirks.

For this meeting then I have chickened out with a "if I don't solve it then I would charge you" clause. It just takes the heat off a little bit. Wish me luck.

12/01/2024

Think about how you currently access your resources and what happens when you have a new employee who needs guidance from Minute 1 on Day 1. An intranet can make both of these challenges so much more straightforward.

As a freelancer who specialises in using Google Sites I create more intranets than websites. To define those two nouns more clearly (from my point of view at least); a website is an external place on the world wide web that is open to the public, an intranet is an internal, private area that requires viewers to log into an account of some kind. For a Google Sites intranet, that “account of some kind” is a Google account, or Gmail, as some of you may recognise it.

If your company subscribes to Google Workspace and your employees have accounts within your domain then Sites is a great solution if you require an intranet.

Giving access to an intranet becomes challenging for those who choose not to pay out monthly fees for Workspace. An intranet is generally a private thing for companies with the possibility of sensitive information being on display. For a Google Sites intranet to be private then the published site has to be set to ‘Restricted’ in the site’s share settings. From that point on only Google accounts (Workspace or free Gmail) can access the intranet if those accounts have been given permission in the share settings.

For those of you weighing up the possibility of using Google Sites for your intranet that possibly sounds like reasons to move on and use something else. But wait, Google Sites is free - the big advantage that people tend to forget about. It’s even free to people who have free Google accounts! Additionally, there are no hidden costs, no add-ons, no nothing that will make you pay money. Free is good but also causes people to be suspicious, as I’ve found out over the last 12 years working with Google products. In the next few paragraphs I will give reasons and examples on why you should continue to choose Sites for creating an intranet.

A few years ago I received an enquiry from a franchisee of a California-based real estate company. The owner of the franchise had seen my Google Sites Intranet gig on an online marketplace and wanted one for her business. Before a contract begins I always like to make sure that my prospective client is aware of the limitations of the platform. At the time the franchisee in this case had a free Gmail account herself, did not subscribe to Workspace and had about ten employees. I explained that, to be able to view the intranet, her employees would require a Google account. Unfazed by this my client simply asked her employees to sign up for a free Google account if they hadn’t already got one. Bear in mind that some sources suggest that Gmail has around 1.8 million active users on Earth. Some people have multiple accounts but that’s still a fair chunk of the world population. My point is that I’ve created many intranets using Google Sites and very rarely has it been a problem for anyone to access them.

Not long after its launch in March 2022 my client told me how useful her intranet was for her and her colleagues. When she mingled with other franchisees at their regular social gatherings she would tell them about the intranet and who to contact if you were in the market for one. I have had a steady stream of enquiries and orders since from that company’s franchisees.

For a variety of reasons I have made more intranets for US-based real estate companies than any other sector. What do real estate agents put on their intranets? Mainly, it’s a place to consolidate all of their links: a lot of them tend to be pages full of buttons aimed at their resources and external websites.

The intranet I’ve been referring to is a good example to use. It begins, on the Home page, with a short welcome, a weekly diary and a monthly diary. Then we meet the team with profile pictures and basic information. Below them are button links to the major pages that are most commonly used. The next page on the navigation bar is called ‘Start Here’ and this is one of those pages that’s full of button links. It has the feel of an onboarding page with links to show new starters how to set up their email signature, join certain Facebook groups and how to take and submit a head-shot photograph. Most of my client’s files are stored in Dropbox and this page links to some of the most important PDFs kept there. The next page, ‘Essentials’, points people in the direction of local realtor associations and other similar resources that real estate agents require.

In total there are 150 links across 10 pages. Originally, against my advice, my client requested that all links be added to the Home page. While these were split into sections, which gave it some kind of organisation, there were many reasons why I wasn’t keen on the one-page option. The number of buttons on the page made it difficult to navigate, especially if you wanted to get to a link that was at the bottom. It made the built-in search function redundant as results only point you to pages and not to the exact position of the text. From an editing point of view it was a nightmare as the sheer number of graphics (buttons) on the page meant it was painfully slow to load. This did not affect the actual published site which loaded fairly quickly. In short, keep web pages short, it’s a good rule.

What Google Sites has provided for my client (and many others clients) is one place for all resources. Those resources can be typed into the intranet, embedded or linked. Organised properly they can be an invaluable tool for your company that will be the first thing employees look at in the morning and the last thing they close down at night.

07/06/2023

Let’s just get this bit in first. I can use any web platform to build a website. I could also use HTML and CSS. What is the reason why I have chosen to use Google Sites for all of the websites and intranets I have created or worked on since September 2017? The answer is that it is simply the easiest platform for me to use and for my customers to maintain. It’s not even a contest. The second reason would be that it is free and there are no subscription add-ons or any other hidden costs. When you have a website designed by me then you just pay me and that’s it. Unless you want a domain name mapping to the site then you will have to pay for that, but that’s standard.

The latest updates to Google Sites brought improvements to the built-in button links and the width of the website.

Button Links
The built-in button links in Google Sites are limited. If the word or phrase you want to have on a button has to be short or there will be letters missing at the end - unless you make your button very wide, which just looks silly. In this case it’s best to make an image in something like Google Drawings and use that as an image link. With that method the world is your oyster as you could design to your own liking. With Sites buttons it’s just text and some control over the colour. There is also the option to have no fill (just a border) and text-only. But that was it. At least Google has recently expanded its button options to include alignment options and the ability to make the button shrink to the text. Still, I think Google is missing a trick here and should invest more time on buttons.

Site Width
I have to be honest, this is something I never thought about. Before new options were rolled out during April and May 2023 the width of any Google Sites website was restricted to just one option. As you make Expand a window width-ways, the body (everything between the navigation bar and footer) would be responsive and gaps between elements would get wider until a certain point. Then the content would stay in the middle as empty space grew at the edges. Now, in Themes, you get a choice between default, wide and full. Default is what I described above. Wide looks a bit like default to me! If you set the site width to full then you see a massive difference as elements, such as images, increase in size. The built-in buttons get wider and if you have positioned a text box over to the left, then it will move over to the left of your screen. There is another option thrown in here called ‘Show frame’. When switched on with default or wide site width selected it will narrow the appearance of your site e.g. rows will not spread out to the edge of the window. You can even choose the colour of the background.

I look forward to seeing the next batch of updates. What about page-level permissions and a built-in blogging feature?

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22/03/2023

Last week I spent about ten hours converting a complex Adobe InDesign file to Microsoft Word. As I don’t have InDesign this had to be done via a PDF - basically copying and pasting. The document was made up of tables with very little normal text. For a few days I was immersed in Word, a product I don’t use that often these days. Why? Because I prefer the simplicity of Google Docs. However, I can see the advantages of Word over Docs, as well as vice versa. I thought it would be good to write about a comparison of the two.

Microsoft Word and Google Docs are two of the most popular word processors on the market, and for good reason. Both programs offer a wide range of features and capabilities, making them a great choice for anyone who needs to create and edit documents.

However, there are some key differences between the two programs that may make one a better fit for you than the other. Here's a look at the pros and cons of each program to help you decide which one is right for you.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a powerful word processor that has been around for decades. It's packed with features and options, making it a great choice for anyone who needs to create complex documents.

Some of the pros of Microsoft Word include:

A wide range of features and options
A user-friendly interface
The ability to create and edit complex documents

Some of the cons of Microsoft Word include:

It can be expensive, especially if you need to purchase the full Microsoft Office suite
It can be resource-intensive, making it slow on older computers
It can be difficult to learn, especially if you're not already familiar with word processors

Google Docs

Google Docs is a cloud-based word processor that is part of the Google Workspace suite of productivity apps. It's a great choice for anyone who needs to create and edit documents online, as it can be accessed from any device with an internet connection.

Some of the pros of Google Docs include:

It's free to use
It's cloud-based, so you can access your documents from anywhere
It's easy to use
It's constantly being updated with new features

Some of the cons of Google Docs include:

It doesn't have as many features as Microsoft Word
It can be slow to load, especially if you're working with a large file
It doesn't have as much offline functionality as Microsoft Word

Which program is right for you?
The best word processor for you depends on your individual needs and preferences. If you need a powerful word processor with a wide range of features, Microsoft Word is a great option. If you're looking for a cloud-based word processor that's easy to use and free to use, Google Docs is a great choice.

Ultimately, the best way to decide which program is right for you is to try both of them out and see which one you prefer.

It’s as simple as that really. I will add that I have done many conversions from Word to Docs. Some of my customers have requested that their documents be exactly the same in the Google version. I don’t recall ever not being able to replicate more advanced features from Word - sometimes it takes a little more work, trickery and talent (me). The main difference is that you can get Docs for free while Word normally comes at a price somewhere along the line.

08/03/2023

I use Google Sites to make websites and intranets for my customers. All the people I collaborate with on these projects find me on Upwork and Fiverr where I have a profile that states that I am a Google Sites expert. This means they have thought about Google Sites as an option for them. However, I sense that the majority of people looking for websites go in search of designers with experience of Wordpress and Wix, or any other much-advertised platform.

Google don't really push their product - I don't think I have ever seen an ad for Sites. It's also completely and utterly free, with no hidden costs, and no add-ons for which you have to pay extra. I believe these two factors generate some kind of prejudice against Google Sites in a kind of weird and twisted way. But it's been around since 2016 and its predecessor, Classic Google Sites, was born in 2008.

There are plenty of cases where you should be using Google Sites and I think it should be your first port of call when contemplating building a website. There are also plenty of cases where you shouldn't even think about Google Sites - if you have a big budget and want a website that can wow your audience, then go for it and sign up a web designer who can code or use Wordpress to its potential. If you are thinking of blogging then just find a platform that automates the blogging process.

For everything below fancy animations and blogging there is Google Sites. It's free and, in my opinion, it is the easiest website platform to maintain. You don't need any coding experience and you can collaborate with others on the content of your website.

Google is constantly developing the platform, adding new features every few months or so, listening to daily users like me who use it and make suggestions. It makes lovely websites that are responsive to today's range of screen sizes, all set up to match your branding.

Thinking of having a website for your business, organisation or just yourself? Then talk to me first - let's see if the free option is suitable before you spend some precious cash on something you may not need. Obviously you have to pay me if you want me to create the website, why else would I be creating this post?

06/03/2023

It's been a long time coming but Pexica Cloud & IT Services have finally created a page. Phil is here to help with anything related to Google Workspace. Currently I am working on lots of intranets using Google Sites and a large PDF that is to be replicated in Microsoft Word.