With the 2 year mark almost coming up with my Wix website, I decided to save the $120/year price for Google Domains at $12/year. I thought the following process:
Buy Google Domain –> Create Google Site –> Connect Google Domain to Google Site –> Find Template That Looks Most Similar To Wix Site –> Copy Everything From Wix
… would take a few hours, max.
Instead, I first had problems linking my Google site to my Google domain. I had to do the following:
- Subdomain forward under Synethetic records of mydomain.com –> http://www.mydomain.com with temporary redirect, and do not forward path.
- @ TXT 1h “google-site-verification=XJ4b6u2YyCZ3nG_R57R0q_RHIYafjmXzxtnE7-e-4_U”
www CNAME 1h ghs.googlehosted.com.
Confusing? Yah I’m pretty confused. Thank goodness for Google Tech Support.
Next, I realized I needed to make Google slides for every time there was a photo gallery on my website under Wix. A lot of time was spent making them look good. Not to mention, Google sites does not allow me to place objects wherever I want, I have to put them inside tables (and remove borders via html) and create columns in order to get spacing correctly. I also realized there was no way to fix the huge gap between the navigation bar and content area. So, I needed to change it to the “Iceberg” theme whether I liked it or not. I’d then modify my images using Photoshop in order to darken or lighten or merge certain images or do whatever I want.
Last, the most time consuming part. Figuring out if the design looks right, which is nearly impossible to subjectively know. I asked ten people, and they didn’t make it easy. It seemed like they would all have something different to say:
- Websites tend to be in one page now. They are usually hosted on Squarespace (which is the same price as Wix)
- Many were in disagreement of background color. I went with my Architecture friend’s suggestion, since she is the most knowledgeable out of all ten people
- Websites also tend to be much wider, while mine is narrow
While I’m not completely done with the content side of it, it has taken me 3.5 days to just get the design up to shape. And I’m still unsure if it looks good!