I’ve had my CompSci department page live at my current school for nearly two years now. It links many of the resources students find invaluable and is regularly used across KS3, iGCSE and IB courses. However the new Google Sites layout is much easier to configure and seems to help with accessibility so I decided in the last few weeks of term to help smooth the handover process by rebuilding. The problem was I wanted to retain my extremely useful TinyURL shortcut and make it point to the new site – and that’s not possible.
The solution
So I will have to keep the homepage of the original site (fine, I’ll transfer ownership) but wanted a quick way to redirect automatically without having users click on a link. Luckily someone had already thought of a way to do this with (the old) Google Sites: URL Redirector Modified
Setting up the redirect
To set this up simply:
- go to the Insert menu when editing the page in the old Google Sites
- select More Gadgets…
- click on Public and then enter “url redirector modified” in the search box
- select the gadget
Next customise your redirect. The first textbox is for your new URL. I also chose 10 seconds for the timeout as I wanted the students to see a message about the new site before the redirect, however you could adapt as required.
Then simply save your page and try it out!
