Google Sites now lets you create your own custom themes for more consistent branding

Welcome to the Workspace Sessions. Workspace Sessions brings you the latest from Google Workspace, the Google Admin Console, and all things related to Enterprise and Education from the world of Google.

Now that the new Google Sites has all but taken over for the traditional version, boasting a cleaner UI and more integration with the company’s other services, like Youtube, Drive, and even new editing tools, Google is now looking to add a few extra features to make it more useful beyond the visual redesign. While we’re likely to see more updates over time, today, I wanted to discuss something I’ve felt it’s needed for a long time – custom themes.

Yep, as though carefully crafting its plan for domination of small business tools, Google has taken this many years to add them. Over the next two weeks, you’ll start to see an option in the ‘Themes’ section for a blank ‘Created by you’ template. Clicking it will pull up a whole host of options that you can tweak to make a design that is uniquely yours.

Name your theme, insert your logo and banner image, and then choose from a slew of custom color palettes, or create your own. Once you’ve finished, you can go on designing your site by hand with more customization options than the pre-built themes offer. Change your font and text style, colors, brand images, navigation settings, and style of components such as buttons and so on all from the right-hand side panel!

It would be fantastic to see a community tab for themes that allows you to copy someone else’s design – minus their logo and banner image, of course. This would allow you to choose from way more themes than the only six on tap if you’re not super interested in creating your own.

Google hopes to allow you to create and share sites that better match your brand guidelines or specific styles with this update. All Workspace customers, G Suite Basic and G Suite for Business users, and even those with personal Google Accounts will benefit from this when it fully rolls out, so keep an eye out!

This installment of Workspace Sessions is sponsored in part by CTL. CTL is an industry leader in the deployment and management of Chrome and Chrome OS hardware. Headquartered in the USA, CTL designs and purpose builds Chrome devices specifically to meet the needs of its customers. Find out more about CTL here.