How to run your web based infrastructure at Google?

As many of us know Google offer great services for all levels of users. Be it is your personal usage, home business / small business usage or enterprise use, they have one or multiple solutions for every category of users. In this article, I will be writing about the potential use of Google for your business, especially on how you can run “almost free” web infrastructure.

To have a website with your own domain name, you will have to buy one. You may choose to use one of the popular domain registrars or even Google itself. The cost of the domain name normally ranges between $8 to $15. Some domain names would be lower than this and others might be higher. I am taking the domain name ciso.in for examples in this article

Website

Once you have the domain name, you will need to set up a website.  If you have some web development background with a bit of HTML knowledge you could do it yourself, otherwise better get a developer. To setup a website, you could use either Blogger or Google Sites service offered by Google.

Blogger allows you to setup websites with the style of a blog. You may also have websites with a normal brochure style. To setup the website, you need to start a blog at Blogger.com. Map the blog to your custom domain. Customize your theme to your brand. Post your content as posts. Map the post links to your menu items and that’s it. you are good to go. The not so good side is that the links are not that beautiful and may not be very SEO based thing you might want.

The other service you should explore is Google Sites. Google Sites for naked domains is bundled with Google Apps; which can be accessed from www.google.com/a . Google sites as well offers custom URLs so that you could map your domain name to the Google Sites . The advantage of Google sites is that it is provides clean URLs as and the way you like it to be. Once your domain is mapped to Google as required, you should set up a Google Site. Once you have the Google Site, you will go to the Site Setting > General > Web Address Mapping > Map this site area. From here you can map the domain name to the site.

Email

Google Apps offers email, which is more or less Gmail. The only problem with the Google Apps email is that it will not be offering all the Gmail services. To setup the email, you will need to make changes to your MX records so that the emails will be forwarding to Google Mail.

Documents

Another service for business as well as individuals from Google is the Google Docs. Google docs is offered through Google Apps as well. You have the likes of Word, Excel and PowerPoint available under Google Apps. The key advantage of using Google Docs over the conventional office suites is that it allows seamless collaboration with your peers. You can export these files into the populat formats

Calendar

Google Calender is another tool your business would want to use. It is very important for the organization to have a calendar to manage all your events like meetings. Google Calendar has a built-in reminders feature which will it easy for you to send text message or email to you at scheduled intervals before an appointment. In addition, the Google Calendar invitations can be imported to Microsoft Outlook, among other programs. Finally, even if you’re offline, you can still see your meetings.

Social Media

Google has recently introduced Google Buzz, the social face of Google after attempts like Orkut and Google Profile. To access Google Buzz, you need to have the Gmail Account (not the Google apps email). Buzz competes directly with the likes of Facebook and Twitter communities and use a similar concept. Google Buzz helps organizations in having real time communications just like Google wave with an option to Buzz all Gmail users unlike Google Wave which is limited to have only to the circles. This will enable you to communicate with you customers, vendors and other stakeholders more efficiently.

Google Talk

Google talk is another tool which will enhance the communication within an organization. You can have an internal chat system which is running on your domain name but the service is through Google.

Google Maps

Another Google service which would help the business is Google Maps. You can add and edit your business listing through Google Maps.

In this article, the other popular Google services like Adwords, AdSense, Analytics, Checkout, Webmaster Central etc are not included as the focus of this article is only to help businesses to run their web infrastructure completely free. This also does not include ideas on how to generate income using Google

What are the services you are running presently at Google cloud?

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