canNOT make my Google Sites Website go online no way no how

Question

Have built a small site with Google Sites. Its Google Sites address is https://sites.google.com/accessibilitypartners.co.uk/accessibilitypartners/home - that works, you can check it out. What I'm trying to do is link it to the domain name.

This is where I might screw up the terminology, I've got Asperger's and this is my first ever website! I'm doing it with an online friend to try to get disabled people more work. So if I say something from here on in that's obviously - to you - incorrect, be nice and try to understand what I mean or ask me questions that will clarify things for you - I'm having a Freddy Kreuger Special trying to get this thing online!

The website name I want to use is accessibilitypartners.co.uk. I THINK that's what they mean by 'domain name', am I right? So I'm in Domains.Google.Com. Under Host Name I've got accessibilitypartners.co.uk, Type = TXT, TTL 1 hour, Data google-site-verification=ko7PqtHlYSelWtWIiFY7J_2l3CGucSntJjCGq35na_w"

The next column down is....

https://sites.google.com/.accessibilitypartners.co.uk CNAME 1 hour
ghs.googlehosted.com.

Under that it's got Google Workspace, with accessibilitypartners under Types MX, SPF and TXT. I don't fully understand any of that but in the end columns for each are vast sets of letters. I can copy and paste them here for you if that helps.

I've also discovered something called Web Forwarding, which I THINK - am not SURE so feel free to correct me - means I can direct all traffic to a given website address. Do I need to use that? Do I put my website addy - accessibilitypartners.co.uk - in there and redirect everything to https:.//sites.google.com/accessibilitypartners.co.uk/accessibilitypartners/home? I've no idea if I need to do that or not.

Please, feel free to ask for any more info. I've spent 3 days watching YouTube vids. telling me how incredibly easy this is, doing everything they tell me (apart from one sucka who was finding things in Google menus that were flat not there for me!) and I STILL can't get my domain to point to my website. I KNOW it's not TOTALLY important as the sites.google version works and I can tell people that one, but I'd LURVE the accessibilitypartners.co.uk one to work - I'm flat outta ideas!

If you think at any point of this 'That's odd - why's he got that there?' I promise you there's no Clever Intent, I've just messed up. Some of the fields in Domains.Google won't let me click on them to edit them. I know about Admin. Console, am in no way, shape or form an expert in it, I just know where the thing is!

This should've been live days ago. I've been lying to my friend and saying 'Propagation!' but I'm not sure if that's the problem or not, pretty sure I've stuffed up somewhere. No idea where, could be anywhere.

HELP!!

Yours hopefully

Chris.

Answer 1

It appears that you've been able to get DNS configured correctly to the site.

It's unclear to me how you solved the issue as your site's DNS has an Address record for your site:

dig accessibilitypartners.co.uk

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;accessibilitypartners.co.uk.   IN  A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
accessibilitypartners.co.uk. 3221 IN    A   216.239.36.21

NOTE You can type accessibilitypartners.co.uk into the web-based Dig provided by Google Toolbox to see these records.

I expect (but don't) see a CNAME record pointing to ghs.googlehosted.com.

To answer your question(s):

1. Yes, accessibilitypartners.co.uk is a domain.
2. If you use a domain managed by Google Domains, Google Sites makes these changes for you automatically.

You should have had an entry like the below to map e.g. your website (www) to the Google Sites site but Google Sites does this for you; you should not need to manually add the entry if you're using Google Domains.

Name	Type	Data
www	CNAME	ghs.googlehosted.com.

What this does is:

1. resolves www.accessibilitypartners.co.uk
2. to a Google endpoint (ghs.googlehosted.com)
3. that maps your host (i.e. www.accessibilitypartners.co.uk)
4. to your Google Sites site (i.e. sites.google.com/accessibilitypartners.co.uk)

When you configure a Google Domain in Google Sites, you are also prompted "Redirect the root domain" (sometimes known as a naked domain). If you check this box, Google Domains adds a redirect so that, in addition to being able to type www.accessibilitypartners.co.uk, lazy folks like me (:-)) can type accessibilitypartners.co.uk (NB not www) and be redirected to the website correctly.