Using Google Drive to gather your Website Content
It’s free, it’s feature-rich, and it’s a perfect companion to your website project. Here’s how to go about using Google Drive to prepare your website content.
Page Contents:
- Create Sitemap as Folders
- Organize and Upload
- Convert to Google Doc
- Clear Formatting
- Edit & Review
This page is best viewed using a larger screen. Organizing files, folders, etc is very difficult on a mobile device. Please visit this page using your computer or iPad in landscape mode.
Create Nested Folders
- Use Site Outline as a Guide
- Create a folder for each "section"
- Create a folder for each page inside that section folder
- Name the folders the exact same name as the page title
- the first document you should have is your Site Outline
Here’s how it looks with a few folders.
Creating a single folder for each page gives you an organized location for photos, videos, PDFs, etc for that page. We need these media files to be loose and not embedded in the text document.
As you can see we have a “Website Training” section, and 3 pages inside that (as folders). Nested folders inside section folders help keep things organized.
What it looks like on a desktop.
Organize and Upload
- Upload Text Files (your page's text content)
- Upload any photos & video
- Scale & Crop Your images (RGB, 72 DPI, 1024px)
- images can not be embedded inside Word files and must be loose image files in the folders.
Inside the “3 Top Tips” folder is an image, and the Google Document. The next section below will break down the text document process.
Creating a single text document for each page gives you a single document for all of the text you need. Having the images as loose files will be what is used on the site. (this is also setting you up with a workflow for when you want to manage your site yourself.)
Convert to Google Doc
(only if you uploaded Word files)
- Opening your Word File will create a Google Doc
- Delete the old file
- convert only if you intended to collaborate and edit the document
There’s no extra step here, so here’s a moment to just say “hi, I appreciate you checking this page out. Want to see a recent photo of Tucker?
Clear Formatting
(text color, specific fonts, and any non-default sizes)
- Bold, Italic, Headers, and Links are supported
- clear out font, size, and color formatting
- clearing out all styling is still required even if you do not intend to collaborate, update, edit the text of the page content,
WordPress and CSS Styles will take over the site’s “skin” look and feel. Copy/Paste supports Bold, Italic, Headers (1,2,3,4), and Links
Edit & Review
- Be sure your content is free of grammar and Spelling errors
- Verify any information to make sure it is accurate and clear to the reader
- Consider this content DONE and ready to "go live"
- consider that it takes a lot more time and additional costs to review a website for edits than it does to complete it here.
Here you can see what a Google Doc will look like when it’s done, and then after it’s used in a website’s page.
