Teachers rejoice! Google Sites just added new customization tools, themes coming next year

Despite its minimal features as a site builder when compared to something as powerful as WordPress, Google Sites’ streamlined tools and simplicity has caught fire with educators, many of which are using the service to teach their students about web development at an early age. While Sites has come a long way, adding native integration with Google Drive, Calendar, and more in recent years, it’s lacked a handful of basic editing features that you’d assume it’s had for years if you hadn’t first tried it.

Now, you can adjust the text size, font, color, spacing, and more of your existing Google Sites! This should make it much easier to add a personal touch and polish to your words, paragraphs, pages, and sections. I’ve said this a few times recently, but it’s amazing to me that some of Google’s services have lacked such simple but necessary features for so long without someone at the company having realized or done something about it.

These new font improvements will become available automatically to you over the next two weeks if you’re not already seeing them, so keep checking back! If you’ve set your domain up to receive updates a week after they officially roll out to prepare your organization for these changes (Scheduled Release domains), then you will begin to see the new tools on January 5, 2021, and at the latest on January 19th.

Next year, Sites will also add the ability for users to create themes, which will allow for fonts, colors, and styles to be set and updated across the entire site with just a few clicks. This is actually getting me really excited to play with Google Sites again! Having launched in 2008, the service was aging pretty badly before Google decided in 2017 to deprecate it in favor of an all-new Google Sites. In fact, they’re coming to the end of that time period soon and will see off the old version at some point in this next year – They recently launched a tool to help everyone transition their classic sites over to the new design, so be sure to take advantage of that as well. It’s my hope that Google continues to invest in Sites and find ways to make it competitive while retaining its simplicity.

Available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus, as well as G Suite Basic, Business, Education, Enterprise for Education, and Nonprofits customers 

Who will receive this update