Our standardised development platform to make our e-learning sites is Google Sites, a platform I hadn't used until now. It's a template-based site builder that has some real good things going for it (it's free for a start), but I've found myself bumping up against its capabilities almost from the get-go.
The problems I'm having are, to be fair, typical of me when I try to use supplied environments such as this one. I have this habit of pushing technology to wring it of all its features, sometimes just to see if I can, other times because I stubbornly refuse to accept a platform is not meant for this sort of thing. In the case of Google Sites, I've found it to be restrictive, both in features and implementation, and not really suited to what I want to achieve.
To Google's credit, I don't think their platform is really meant to host anything more than basic sites with a bit of added functionality. It works well with Google's other offerings naturally, and it has all the rudimentary tools you'd need to design a flat web page, but the experience feels decidedly old-school, a time capsule from the early noughties when technology such as this would be heralded as groundbreaking. In today's web 2.0/3.0/insert-buzzword-here, it all feels outdated. Google agrees with me here by the way: they've been developing a modern replacement that has a more modern feel to it. It's not finished yet though, and is far from feature complete. It also follows their 'material' design guidelines as used on Android, so it'll look slick, but also identical to every other site made with it.
As a result of the restrictions I've had to go far deeper into workarounds than I'd like, given my original intent that this should be about the learning experience rather than the use of technology. I've used my own server space to host files I couldn't otherwise use and gone under the bonnet to integrate them, hand-coding HTML, CSS and even custom gadgets for things that would otherwise just need cut-and-paste. I've also had to sacrifice some functionality just to get things to work. The best example of this is where I've added in-page coding environments, courtesy of Codepen. I'd like to use the JavaScript embed code as it is more feature-filled, but I can't do that here. I have to use the iframe fallback instead, which is far less impressive. Other intended add-ins I've had to abandon completely as there was no iframe alternative.
Another limit I've encountered is the need to jump through hoops to customise seemingly simple things. For example, the primary navigation is a sidebar, chosen as the optional horizontal menu just does not support subcategories. By default, the pages you add to the sidebar go in alphabetical order, and while you can nest pages in a hierarchy you can't reorder them at all. The only way to do it is to entirely discard the default menu and build one manually. Sure, it's only an inconvenience, but it illustrates more generally how if you want to deviate from the defaults even a little bit you have to go right back to square one and are left out on your own.
Throw in other things such as a security model that won't let you load http content in an iframe, or use the src attribute just to load an image and you may understand why this technically minded individual has struggled to make the platform work for him. I wish I could have used Wordpress or some other proper CMS I know can be customised to my tastes, then been able to focus entirely on the content, rather than getting it working to start with.
The problems I'm having are, to be fair, typical of me when I try to use supplied environments such as this one. I have this habit of pushing technology to wring it of all its features, sometimes just to see if I can, other times because I stubbornly refuse to accept a platform is not meant for this sort of thing. In the case of Google Sites, I've found it to be restrictive, both in features and implementation, and not really suited to what I want to achieve.
To Google's credit, I don't think their platform is really meant to host anything more than basic sites with a bit of added functionality. It works well with Google's other offerings naturally, and it has all the rudimentary tools you'd need to design a flat web page, but the experience feels decidedly old-school, a time capsule from the early noughties when technology such as this would be heralded as groundbreaking. In today's web 2.0/3.0/insert-buzzword-here, it all feels outdated. Google agrees with me here by the way: they've been developing a modern replacement that has a more modern feel to it. It's not finished yet though, and is far from feature complete. It also follows their 'material' design guidelines as used on Android, so it'll look slick, but also identical to every other site made with it.
As a result of the restrictions I've had to go far deeper into workarounds than I'd like, given my original intent that this should be about the learning experience rather than the use of technology. I've used my own server space to host files I couldn't otherwise use and gone under the bonnet to integrate them, hand-coding HTML, CSS and even custom gadgets for things that would otherwise just need cut-and-paste. I've also had to sacrifice some functionality just to get things to work. The best example of this is where I've added in-page coding environments, courtesy of Codepen. I'd like to use the JavaScript embed code as it is more feature-filled, but I can't do that here. I have to use the iframe fallback instead, which is far less impressive. Other intended add-ins I've had to abandon completely as there was no iframe alternative.
Another limit I've encountered is the need to jump through hoops to customise seemingly simple things. For example, the primary navigation is a sidebar, chosen as the optional horizontal menu just does not support subcategories. By default, the pages you add to the sidebar go in alphabetical order, and while you can nest pages in a hierarchy you can't reorder them at all. The only way to do it is to entirely discard the default menu and build one manually. Sure, it's only an inconvenience, but it illustrates more generally how if you want to deviate from the defaults even a little bit you have to go right back to square one and are left out on your own.
Throw in other things such as a security model that won't let you load http content in an iframe, or use the src attribute just to load an image and you may understand why this technically minded individual has struggled to make the platform work for him. I wish I could have used Wordpress or some other proper CMS I know can be customised to my tastes, then been able to focus entirely on the content, rather than getting it working to start with.
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