<< Section Eight - Site Themes  |  Section Ten - Sharing Your Site >>

Section Nine - The Sidebar

The sidebar is the default form of website navigation in Google Sites, and can include sub-pages as well as pages (going down several levels, actually). These "sub-pages" include those specifically designated as being under particular pages, as well as individual announcements or posts. As such, the sidebar is particularly useful when you want to have separate sub-pages for multiple topics, each topic having its own separate page on your site.

For the sake of simplicity, up to this point in the tutorial, we have used Horizontal navigation. Before activating the sidebar (vertical), it will be necessary to first deactivate Horizontal navigation.

Fig. 9-1

To deactivate Horizontal navigation and activate the Sidebar, we will first click on the More Actions button at the top, and select Edit site layout.

Fig. 9-2

Then, click on Horizontal navigation to disable it from the site. This will remove the navigation bar at the top of each page.

Fig. 9-3

Next, click on Sidebar to enable it.

Fig. 9-4

Once the Sidebar appears, click on the pencil icon at the top of it to edit its preferences.

Fig. 9-5

In the preferences window, you can choose to display the Sidebar on the left or on the right, as well as its width. We will keep the default settings, and click OK.

Fig. 9-6

To edit the Sidebar navigation, simply click on it to open the Configure navigation window.

Fig. 9-7

From this window, you can choose to either have Google Sites automatically add/delete pages as you do (this also will include sub-pages, such as individual announcements unless you specify otherwise), or add them manually. To become familiar with the manual method first, deselect the checkbox beside Automatically organize my navigation. Click on Add page (we will say more about the automatic method shortly).

Fig. 9-8

To add a particular page, click on its title, and select OK.

Fig. 9-9

If you would rather have your pages organized automatically, click on Automatically organize my navigation. Setting the Levels of pages to show at 2 or higher will tell Google Sites to add sub-pages (since this includes announcements and posts, set it to 1 if you want to keep the Sidebar from getting too cluttered). For now, we will leave it a the default setting of 2 to give you an idea of what it will look like. When finished, click OK.

Fig. 9-10

To finish, click Close to exit the site layout functions and return to the main page.

Fig. 9-11

Here is our completed Sidebar, set on automatic navigation, showing both pages and sub-pages.

<< Section Eight - Site Themes  |  Section Ten - Sharing Your Site >>
[Back to Top]