At times, keeping up with all these changes seems like a full-time job. To do so, I follow a dozen or so official Google blogs, including what I consider the single most essential of all, the quasi-weekly Google Apps Team official update feed. For organizations that have adopted the Google Apps platform, if you subscribe to one Google feed, that’s the one.

The constant flow of changes, updates and improvements to the Google Apps platform presents another dilemma: What features are you overlooking or underutilizing? To help advance the cause, here’s a few Google Sites features our organization has used that you may have overlooked or forgotten:

Re-purpose a site using “Copy this site”

Go to More actions » Manage Site » Site settings » General, and at the bottom you’ll see options for “Site Actions,” including one to “Copy this site.” Google Sites primarily promotes this feature as a way to copy other sites you are invited to. But, to coin a phrase, think outside the box: Use this feature to repurpose your own sites. Here are two other ways we’ve used this feature:

• We copied an existing site within our own domain and used the site “copy” to experiment with and apply a visual redesign of the site “original”; once the redesign was completed, we just made the copy the functioning site for our users and deleted the original.
• We created a site with a load of content that we later decided would work better for users if we broke the site into two sites. No problema. There is no need to re-create the second site manually. Just make a copy of the site, then trim the pages and files from each site that will be used in the other site. Done.

Use “Copy this site” to change the URL for a site within your domain

In an earlier iteration of Google Sites, there was an administrative option for changing a private site URL within your Google Sites domain, but that option has been removed. (Changing public site URLs involves different rubrics. Also users with site editing privileges can still change the URL for individual site pages under More actions » Page settings. But I digress.) You can get around this site URL renaming restriction by simply copying the site and giving it the new URL of your choice. Then just redirect your users to the new URL.

Leveraging the Google Sites template features

It is hard to think of a Google Site feature that is more practical — no, better said, all but indispensible — than the site template and within-site page template features. There is no need to recreate a site design or its page designs from scratch each time. Tweak your overall site design and work out the look and layout for each of its page types, and then save each page design as a page template. Then use the page template options to replicate the design as you add new pages or even change the page template for existing pages.

Google has recently added a slew of spiffy Google Sites templates, and has posted for download some of the Google-designed template image assets; and a template tips page with a helpful visual guide to how to create, edit and change various site page elements.

Applying a Google Site project template to an existing site

One problem with Google Sites templates (as opposed to Google Sites themes) is that they can only be used for newly created sites; you cannot apply a Google Sites template directly to an existing site. There is a work around, although it may require your using Firebug to sleuth out some of the template image elements.

To experiment with this technique, first copy your existing site, as described above. Using the site copy, go to Manage Site » Site appearance » Themes and apply either the default “Iceberg” theme (if you want the design to have a page-edge shadow) or the “Simple” theme (if a flat page design is what you have in mind.) Then select “Colors and fonts” to view those options for changing the site’s appearance. In a separate browser tab create a temporary site using the Google Site template of choice, and then navigate to “Colors and fonts” for that site, as well.

Now all you have to do is duplicate the color and font settings from the Google Sites template to your site copy. When viewing the settings for some background-image elements, you may be able to view the image directly by clicking on the “View image” link which should display the image in a new window. If it does, you can right-click the image and save it to your local desktop, and then upload it to the your site copy. For some templates, particularly for a Google-designed site, you may have to work harder and use something like Firebug to sniff out the path to the background images so you can open them up for viewing in a separate window. In either case, you will likely want to rename the files before you upload them so you can recall which image is which.

Customize your Google Sites search options

The owner of a particular site, as opposed to its viewers, has options to configure site search so users can search only that particular site or any combination of other domain Google Sites and/or public web sites. For example, our organization has configured two of our domain sites — one we call the “Core Content” with official content only, and the other the “Shared Document Repository” where all users can upload shared files by topic — so that users can search either the site they are at, the other site, or both sites, as illustrated here.

To configure the search options for your site, navigate to Manage Site » Site layout and click the “Configure search” button to the right, and go at it. This is a very easy, flexible way to give your users a wider set of search-target options suitable to the particular site.

Google has posted a helpful list of notable changes, worth reviewing if you are baffled about the what and why of your broken Google Sites customizations. For example, it states: “When you customize your site in the colors and fonts area this will override your inline html styles. Customized colors and fonts now trump inline styles.” Okay, that’s different as are several other things.

As noted earlier, The Findability Project planned integration of select Google Sites content as a GSA target. How we created LSNC’s “official” intranet site with Google Sites was covered (briefly) as part of a recent NTAP presentation.

Since that presentation, we have pretty much completed the migration of all our intranet content over to what LSNC calls its “Shared Private Network” (SPN). For those curious, here is a screenshot of the current site’s home page; and here’s a screenshot of the top levels of the sitemap. As you can see, we have worked to keep the hierarchy simple which means manageable, especially given the number of different folks who have responsibility to maintain its content. Also, we have created a large number of Google Sites file cabinet “upload” pages to make management of those file easier, for the same reasons. So far, so good.

What is great about all this is that the GSA easily targets this selected Google Site, and returns great results from the site. Users can have it both ways, by searching from the GSA frontend but with equal ease from the native search function within the Google Site itself. It’s all good.

Today we felt it was time to let our more ambitious users know how to do a bulk export of their Google Docs to their desktop or other location of choice. So we used Google Docs to create instructions on how to bulk export your Google Docs, with links to the applicable Firefox add-ons and a few basic screen captures to illustrate particular steps. The version of the document linked in this post is shared as a public web page, for illustrative purposes here, but internally what we actually do is simply make the document viewable by all within our domain, and then add a link to it to our endlessly exciting “Team Gizmo Updates” announcement page in Google Sites, plus link it to a special “Google Tools” page, also part of our Google Sites content.

All within our domain can now search for and/or navigate to the solution at our Google Sites. Fewer tech calls on this question. Everyone is happier.