Using responsive design within Google Sites

Question

Is there a way to use responsive design principles with Google Sites. Has anyone tried that. Could you direct me to a sample site. I looked at this google help topic but then th

Answer 1

Mobile yes, responsive no.

I was messing with Google Sites today and you can make a site mobile friendly (I had to come here to get started!). I just used the "Blank Template" to mess around with.

You do need to activate (like others that have mentioned):

Options (gear icon) > Manage site > (scroll down to Mobile) Check.. Automatically adjust for mobile phones. Yeah, let's bury that option way down at the bottom!

Considering the whole mobile "push" Google implemented in the spring of 2015 this should be ON by default for any newly created Google Site.

Just selecting that option makes an OK (basic) mobile site. Not a responsive site. So on my iPhone it does scale photos correctly to fit the device and switches the main horizontal menu to the "hamburger" icon/menu. But collapsing the desktop browser window does not produce responsive results. https://sites.google.com/site/rwstws51/

As a test, I uploaded a way too large photo (2.5mb) to see what would happen. Running the site through Google PageSpeed Insights it did not display any "optimize photos" warning, so seems to serves up an optimized photo for phones and desktops.

I guess the basic theme is actually called "Ski." I tried out the "Legal Pad" theme and it was totally borked on mobile. I think due to the header and content area background images.

To me Google Sites is ideal if you are already heavy into Google's other products... drive, docs, Google+, webmastertools, analytics, etc... As it has links to add those types of items when editing. Or need a quick site for collaborating as you can easily set the site access like YouTube,Drive items.

Also, you are very limited as to what html you can added. Trying to add a script tag gets stripped out when attempting to save. So again depending on the use there are definitely other options out there.