Creating a Custom Sites address for Your Domain’s Google Apps Sites

When you are thinking a professional web the domain name and the domain related sites should be professional. Recently Google Apps is widely used and Google Apps include several services like email, sites, calendar, contacts, docs etc. freely if you are a domain owner.

If you are using the Sites feature for Google Apps, then generally the default address of your sites is https://sites.google.com/a/yourDomain.com. Is it professional? Hopefully not. The professional address for your sites should be like https://sites.yourDomain.com and  all people are much interested for this type of custom web address for your sites. This is fully professional. For example, the domain for this site is www.hideMyTips.com and Google Apps sites feature can be accessed through the address https://sites.google.com/a/hidemytips.com. So, to make this address more readable and professional the address should be like https://sites.hidemytips.com. In this page we will describe how to create such custom sites address for your domain step by step.

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Creating a Custom Sites address for Your Domain’s Google Apps Sites:

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Creating a custom sites address for your domain’s Google Apps is professional and makes your domain’s feature more smarter. In this tutorial page, you will see how to create a custom sites address for your domain’s Google Apps sites. We will do all the things for the domain www.hideMyTips.com. However, all the steps for this tutorial remain same and you just have to replace the domain name hideMyTips with your own domain name.

Step 1: Sign in to your domain’s Google Apps administrator control panel. For example, our domain is www.hidemytips.com

Step 2: After you have logged in to Google Apps administrator control panel, click on Service settings menu and from the drop-down menu choose Sites and you will be the Sites Settings page of your domain’s sites.

Step 3: From Sites Setting control panel, you will find the Web address to access your domain’s sites pages. By default it looks http://sites.google.com/a/yourDomain. Our target is to make it http://sites.yourDomain.com. For example, our domain is hidemytips.com and the sites access URL is http://sites.google.com/a/hidemytips and we will create a custom site address which would look like http://sites.hideMyTips.com. To do this choose Change URL option by clicking the link.

Step 4: After completing the above step, the Change URL for Sites page will be opened and fill in the form to create a custom address, typing a prefix for your new web address. For example, we type sites for our Sites address and the final address looks like http://sites.hidemytips.com and click on Continue button. After finishing this step, you need to modify the CNAME record of your domain.

Step 5: Log in to your domain account and access the Domain Manager settings. The location of Domain Manager varies but it must located to your domain account. From the Domain Manager, go to the CNAME records panel and add the following information to the CNAME settings.

CNAME value or alias	CNAME destination	TTL
sites	ghs.google.com	1 Hour

After setting the value, save all the settings by clicking Save Zone File.

Step 6: Switch back to your Google Apps page where you were at the end of step 4. There you will find a I've completed these steps button. Just click on I've completed these steps button to finish and save the custom sites address of your domain. Then Google will automatically start checking your CNAME record and if everything is working properly then you will be redirected to the Google Apps dashboard panel.

Following the above steps, you can easily map or create a custom sites address for your domain’s Google Apps. Hope, you can do it easily by following the above mentioned steps. Furthermore, if you face any difficulties then tell us in the comment section. Your comments are really expected.