Siteoly

How to create a website with Google sheets for free?

Siteoly — Sun, 23 May 2021 06:50:26 GMT

Before we see about how to create a website with Google sheets, first let's see why this is gaining so much popularity.

Why to build websites using Google sheets?

Explicit database not required

There is no need to have an explicit database like MySQL, DynamoDB, Postgress, or anything as such. Your data just resides in Google sheets. Having explicit databases can be a daunting task to maintain and scale according to the traffic. On top of this, explicit databases also add-on to the costs as the database grows. However, by using Google sheets as a database, there is no explicit cost involved and scales infinitely as your traffic grows.
Easy to visually edit data from Google sheets

It is relatively easy to edit the data from Google sheets than editing directly from a database. For example, if your data resides in a database, you need to connect to your database by a GUI tool to log in with credentials and edit the database record manually. Alternatively, you can build your own SQL statements to modify the database as needed. Another way would be to write some UI code that shows a form or a webpage to enter the data and submit the form/page to get the entered data added/modified to the database. But this approach takes time to write code and build a UI around the database.

But by opting to use Google sheets as your data store, you don't need to explicitly build a UI to edit the Google sheets. All you need is the Google sheets URL to make the changes.
Restrict or share access to data as required

You can easily restrict or share access to data by sharing Google sheets with others. You can either provide a read-only (viewer) access or edit access as well. Multiple people can be added to the Google sheets for access and the beauty is that all people can edit the sheets at the same time. Also, note that Google sheets have an in-built version control system. So, even if something is accidentally lost or modified, you can just go back to previous versions and restore the version. Imagine doing the same in an explicit database like MySQL and that's extremely tough to do multiple times. So, using Google sheets eases all these things.
No need to write code by using solutions like Siteoly

By using solutions like Siteoly, you can just build websites without writing any code. Siteoly does the heavy lifting for you by automating this process. Siteoly can help you build websites by automating the process of querying the data from Google sheets and displaying it on websites. All this can be done for free.
No need to have UI skills or design skills

Converting the Google sheets data into a working website isn't always easy with having decent UI or front-end skills. But with Siteoly, for turning Google sheets data into a website, you don't need any design skills.

How to build websites from Google Sheets?

Below are two services we use for this.

Google sheets
Siteoly - Google sheets website builder

Let us see how we can use Siteoly to build websites with Google sheets data.

Step 1: Login to Siteoly using Google credentials.

Note: Siteoly is the most secure application for Google sheets and you don't need to give public access to your sheet. Your Google sheets will be private.

Step 2: Once you login to the application, to create a website from Google sheets, you need to click on "Create new site"

Step 3: Select the template from the available templates or you can start from scratch by selecting the base template as well.

Step 4: Give a name to your project. For example - "My Google sheets to website project"

Step 5: On the next screen, follow the 3 steps and create your own Google sheet and enter the new Google sheet URL.

Step 6: On the next screen, enter the website name, check availability and click on "Finish and Create site".

Step 7: Now, on the dashboard screen, you will find two links and another link to your Google sheets link.

Google sheets links take you to the Google sheet you connected
Live Test link: This link is to be used to test your changes. You may make changes in the Google sheet and click on the 'live test' link to see the reflected changes. This link usually expires and cannot be shared with your users. If this link expires, you can grab a new link from the dashboard again.
Actual website link: This link is the link that you can share with your users. This link pulls the changes in Google sheets every 60 minutes. Clicking on the 'live test' link refreshes this link also and displays the latest changes on this link.

Step 8: Here is the final site built using Google sheets without writing any code.

Other benefits of using NoCode Google sheets website builder

Multi-design approach without writing any code

Yes. That is correct. The beauty of these NoCode Google sheets tools is that you don't need to have a lot of knowledge on the design part. For example, Siteoly can help you display your site in 40+ card design formats.

See NoCode Google sheet card designs to see the various ways you can display your Google sheets data. All of this is possible without writing any code. If you are a NoCode developer building website using Google sheets, this is a game-changer and saves you hundreds of dollars in design and development costs.
Supports Detailed Pages

NoCode Google sheet tools like Siteoly are not just meant for displaying the data in the form of cards. For each card, you can create a separate detailed page or internal page. On these detailed pages, you can display data in the form of HTML tables, maps, graphs, or pretty much anything.
Embed this data on external sites

There are many times, you may want to display the data in Google sheets on external websites like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc. In these cases, you can just use Siteoly's 'Embed Google sheets data into external sites' feature. This will give you an embeddable javascript code to embed on external sites including a normal HTML site as well.
Supports search and filter functionality

A website without search and filter capabilities servers no purpose in most cases. With Siteoly, any data you display on Google sheets can be displayed with selected filters and search functionality. All of this can be enabled right from Google sheet.
SEO first approach

Siteoly follows a strictly "SEO first" approach. You have a lot of control over your site's data and can set required title tags, headers, social tags. Apart from this, to let Google crawl your site much faster, you can also use the Sitemaps feature. Siteoly also supports the most advanced SEO feature - Structure data/Rich text snippets as well.
Supports complex data display in the form of templates and BYOC (Bring your own code)

You can also display complex data in your detailed pages by templatizing your content and just pass required data to these templates. You can also extend the functionality by bringing your own code to Siteoly platform. For example, every time - a detailed page is opened, you can programmatically call an API to fetch the data and display it on the web page. You can use this to display complex content link graphs, tables, maps, etc as well.
Enterprise plans

Now, Siteoly also supports enterprise plans to support more than 10K pages. This means you can literally create thousands of pages and scale to millions of users using Enterprise plans.

How to build thousand of pages using Google Sheets?

Siteoly — Wed, 12 May 2021 17:47:33 GMT

Have you ever got the need to build thousands of web pages for your product/project?

Use cases to build thousands of web pages

Stock market sites

For people building products around the stock market, share market there is often a need to display data about thousands of companies. The data could be the company's founder's details, historical share price, discussions around company performance. Like this, there are thousands of companies on the stock market. Creating a specific page for each of these companies would benefit a lot both from the user perspective and SEO perspective as well. Alternatively, to support your main product, you can build this a sub-product to get some advantage from SEO. You can in turn redirect these users to your main product or app.
Real estate sites

Another popular use case is to build web pages around real estate data. If you are in a real-estate niche and want to build a webpage for each city based on its data - population, details of State/County, Area, Temperature, Rental value, then it's a tedious process to add all this data to a database and then build webpages to retrieve this data and display for each page.
Product/E-commerce pages

Imagine you have curated a list of 1000 products and you want to create a page for each of these products to display the product details and gain visitors in the process. The same can be replicated for e-commerce store scenarios. For example, you are running a Shopify store and want to build another website (for SEO benefits and target more users) with a page for each of the products in Shopify store, it's a tedious task. The same applies to other e-commerce stores like Magento, Woocommerce as well.
... & many other use cases

Note: One of the biggest advantages this approach can bring you is rich SEO benefits which in turn converts to more users. By creating thousands of pages with your data, you are exponentially building SEO for your content.

"Creating alternative pages for SEO benefits" is one of the most common techniques to improve SEO.

Build thousands of pages with Google sheets and NoCode

Creating multiple pages has been a major challenge for most founders.

Building a separate database takes time
Building a separate database is costly and scaling isn't easy
Building separate code and UI to talk to a database is a time-consuming effort.

With Siteoly's, you can create thousands of pages from Google sheets for your use cases. All you need is to have the data in Google sheets.

Siteoly is one of the best website builders for Google sheets and Siteoly's NoCode builder for Google sheets brings you below advantages while building thousands of pages:

You don't have to worry about scaling. Siteoly automatically scales based on your visitors. No infrastructure handling is required.
Better control of the site UI without any coding or design skills. You can select page designs, header designs, card designs from a combination of 50+ styles. All this happens by just selecting required dropdowns without writing any code.
Full control of SEO - You will have full control of SEO on what you want to show in meta tags and social media tags.
Create templates and pass Google sheet data to the templates without bloating your Google sheets. Create a single template and build thousands of pages out of the templates by passing data. Here is how you can create templates for Google sheets.
Dynamically display data on each detailed page - Sometimes, you may need to display data from an API onto a page. Siteoly fully supports this and you can extend Siteoly's core functionality.
Automatically create a sitemap for all the thousands of pages you create using Siteoly by using the "autogenerated sitemap" feature.

Additionally, you will have full control over adding required signup forms, embed forms, display data from maps, embed external scripts, custom 'page not found(404) pages' for a much better user experience

Using Google Sheets as a Database For Your Website : Yeah or Nah?

Siteoly — Wed, 05 May 2021 14:43:07 GMT

If you have ever used Google Sheets for working on numbers or project tracking, chances are you know how powerful it is for data analysis. But here’s an idea - how about using it as a cost-friendly database for your website? Is it that powerful and reliable?

If yes, what are the types of websites you can build using Google Sheets at the backend as a database? Let’s find out!

Google Sheets - An Introduction

When Google launched Google Sheets in 2006, it became a sensational product due to its capacity to allow multiple users to work on the same spreadsheet in real-time. It was like a breath of fresh air for those of us who were bored to hell with standard spreadsheets day-in and day-out.

Here are some of the key features of Google Sheets that made using spreadsheets much easier and interesting than earlier -

It is a web-based, free-to-use spreadsheets platform that enables users to access, edit, modify and save their work from anywhere without any chances of redundancy.
It allows real-time collaboration for users working on the same spreadsheet. People can comment, edit and view the changes as and when they are made.
Google Sheets comes bundled and free with a Gmail account, thus there’s no need to install any API or third party app to use it.
Whichever phone or device you use, there is an integrated app on all leading operating systems for Google Sheets. It is a seamless experience to access it and work from anywhere.
It works a lot like MS Excel and does not sway away from the UI/UX of excel, allowing users to transition from offline spreadsheets to a cloud platform easily.
The numerous plug-ins and add-ons enable users to do much more than just storing, sorting and analyzing data.

Google Sheets is a powerhouse for data analysis. Most users don’t realize that it can be an equally powerful database for your web services and even fully-functional websites.

Before we explain how you can use google sheets as a database, let us understand a database and why you should choose a frugal alternative to expensive database solutions in the market.

Databases - The Storage System for the Web

Have you ever wondered how the internet is so organized when it comes to storing and accessing information? Hint - It has a lot to do with database management.

At first, databases can seem overwhelming, but a closer look reveals that it is just a collection of data in rows and columns. Now that wasn’t that hard, isn’t it?

You see, a database is a systematic storage system for holding all the information about a certain theme in one place. This place is a database management system. It can be thought of as a virtual warehouse that monitors, organizes, manages, and controls the structured information in a way that allows easy access and understandability of a humongous amount of otherwise confusing data sets.

A language used by DBAs (database administrators) called ‘SQL’ ( structured query language) is used for writing and querying data from the database. It means that to interact with your data items in the warehouse directly, you need to be conversant in SQL. But fret not; you don’t need to worry about that as a user of the database.

Some famous and widely used database management systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MongoDB (NoSQL database).

We will determine whether a simple tool such as Google Sheets can replace these heavy and expensive databases and work as efficiently as a DBMS?

Google Sheets as a Database -

Just Spreadsheets or Something More?

Google sheets is a cloud-based spreadsheet app that lets users work on spreadsheets and collaborate in real-time. It is used mostly for data analysis and project management, but a lesser-known fact is that it can also be used as a database for websites. It comes with advanced features and extra capabilities that add a sheen to otherwise lacklustre spreadsheet software.

What makes Google Sheets usable as a database that it is a cloud-based app and, with some creativity, can be a perfect replacement for smaller web apps and websites. It is also notable that it is not a full-fledged database that can entirely remove big databases from the picture, but light apps and websites which use comparatively smaller data sets can work well with Google Sheets at the backend.

The above knowledge brings us to the question - when should one consider using Google sheets as a database, and what are the best use cases which fit the bill?

Some of the Best Use Cases - Endless Possibilities

While we urge you to rack your brains and try to figure out how you can make the most of this ultimate life-hack, here are some of the examples where people have already implemented Google Sheets as a backend for database for their no-code website.

Quick Prototyping

If you are a product designer or are just playing around with a new idea for your start-up, why not build a quick prototype to test, tweak and showcase to your investors?

Hobby Projects and Portfolio Websites

Several hobby projects that don’t require authentication and user management can be built using Google Sheets as a database. You can use platforms like Github for hosting your page, or you can choose to host it on a separate server. We suggest using Siteoly if you are a beginner and want a free option to test the waters.

Listings Website

If you are a part of a sales or HR team, you can quickly use Siteoly to put out a webpage that displays open positions or a product listings page on your company website. You can also make Stocks and ETF Listings, Affiliate Programs Listings, Marketplace for restaurants, Professional Services Website, and much more. The possibilities are endless, quite literally.

Here are all these awesome ideas for creating a website without coding using Google Sheets. How will you use Siteoly to make your shiny new website from a simple but efficient Google Sheets option? Let us know in the comments below!

More power to you!

Why everyone is obsessed with no-code websites using Google Sheets?

Siteoly — Tue, 04 May 2021 13:47:53 GMT

People have been building websites for the last several years but the way they have been building the websites is constantly changing over the last few years.

Let's see how the two biggest trends can be combined to build websites much faster and easier.

No-Code

One of the growing trends in building websites is - "no-code" websites. This means without actually writing any code, you can build a website. We have tools like this in existence for decades. For example, "WordPress" is a system where you can build a simple website without writing code. But people often don't consider "WordPress" as a No-Code as it involves some bit of writing code for a few changes.

But new tools are coming in that are pure "NoCode". For example, tools like Carrd help you create single-page websites without writing any code.

Now, let's see the other big trend - "Google Sheets"

Google sheet

The usage of Google sheets has been growing exponentially with everyone using Google sheets as their backend. Below are a few reasons why Google sheets are getting popular. If you are also wondering "why do you need to build websites using Google sheets", see below.

Ease of access - Google sheets can be accessed and updated easily either from a web browser or mobile app. With just the URL of a Google sheet, anyone can access the sheet based on access permissions.
** In-built version control** - If you want to use Google sheets as a database or CMS(Content Management System), the first thing that you would be worried is about a version control system. Luckily, Google sheet comes with an in-built version control system to restore the sheet to a particular point in time.
Share with others - Google sheet can be shared easily with anyone just with the click of a button. All you need is the other person's email and add the email for sheet access.
Faster and works at scale - Google sheet works much faster and works at scale to the tune of thousands of rows easily.
Formulas and calculations - You can also add dynamic content into Google sheets by fetching data from third-party APIs and on top of this data, you can apply your formulas and calculations.

Now let's look at a system that can pull the data from Google Sheets and dynamically add this data to a website without writing even a single line of code.

One such tool is Siteoly - A NoCode website builder tool that runs on Google sheets.

Using Siteoly, all you have to do is to fill the Google Sheets with the required data and build a website in less than 10 minutes.

Siteoly has 40+ in-built templates along with a default template. You can easily choose one among them to create your own website. Each template has cards embedded in it and you can choose how you want your cards to look. Once you choose your template you can access the corresponding Google sheet with all the default values, which can be replaced with the required values.

A few use case that you can think of using Siteoly and Google sheets.

Book listing sites
Video listing sites
Discounts and Coupon listing sites
Building thousands of pages from Google sheets data
Stock market listing sites
Event listing sites
Youtube kind of sites
Instagram kind of sites with photos and images
Real estate kind of sites
... about 40 different types of websites all with a single template

Embed Google sheets data into external websites as beautiful cards

Siteoly — Mon, 03 May 2021 17:46:09 GMT

Embedding Google sheets data into existing websites isn't easy. On top of that, if you want to add filters and search functionality on top of your data and add to existing websites, you would need to write a lot of code.

There are many occasions when you need to embed data from Google sheets to external websites. For example, you might have made a list of best books in a Google sheet and you may want to display that data on an external site as below.

The same can be done for various other use cases.

Some popular use cases to embed Google sheets data into external websites.

Build a list of best books in Google sheets and display that data on external websites.
Create a list of best-performing stocks data in Google Sheets and display that on any website
Create employee list in Google sheets and build a beautiful directory from Google sheets data
Curate a list of best products in Google sheets and embed that data anywhere
Listing of events - Just maintain the list in any Google sheets, generate code using Siteoly and embed that data on any site
... there are hundreds of possible use-case to embed the Google sheets data

How to embed Google sheets data into websites using Siteoly?

Follow below steps to embed Google sheets.

2. Click on the "Embed cards" icon.

3. Select the ProjectName from the dropdown and select Sheet Name and Layout as follows.

4. Click on the Generated embed code.

5. Click on the Copy to Clipboard, and use this on any site

Where all can you embed Google sheets data?

Using Siteoly, you can pretty much embed Google sheets data on any website that supports javascript.

Here are some places where you can easily embed Google sheets data.

WordPress

Wordpress is one of the most popular CMS solutions out there. To embed Google sheets data to WordPress, all you need to do is - "get the embed code from Siteoly" and add it to the website's WordPress Post.
Squarespace

Squarespace is another popular player that can help build websites using a web interface. It's a kind of WYSIWYG editor. But embedding Google sheet data into SquareSpace needs some kind of workarounds. But with Siteoly, you can display data from Google sheets onto SquareSpace sites in less than 5 minutes.
Wix, Carrd

Wix and Carrd are other popular website builder tools that let you build websites visually. While embedding static data into Wix or Carrd is easy by just dragging and dropping the files, embedding dynamic data from Google sheets isn't always easy. With Siteoly, all you have to do is copy the embed code and add the code to Wix or Carrd page.
Shopify websites & E-commerce sites

Shopify is one of the most popular players to create eCommerce stores. Other notable players in this space are Woocommerce, Magento, etc. Each of these solutions has its own CMS. But if you want to display some data from Google sheets on these pages, Siteoly is your best choice.
Any other HTML/CSS website

If you are building your own site with adhoc HTML/CSS and other web technologies, then also you can use Siteoly embed code to display the data from Google sheets onto these sites. Irrespective of whatever backend technologies you use like Python, PHP, Ruby, etc as long as you use HTML/Javascript for your front end, you can use Siteoly to embed data from Google sheets.