I thought that it would be a piece of cake to set up a Google site via Google Apps, but perhaps my previous (limited) experience with web development has given me unrealistic expectations. I have actually had a really tough time finding help with the exact question that I have, which is:

How do I change the home page contents???

You see, I'm used to having hosting with someone like GoDaddy, where I can just ftp in and drop my HTML files in the www folder. From research I have found that this is simply not possible with any flavor of Google Sites. That's fine, I can live with it.

So let's say I have www.mydomain.com. When I hit that URL, it redirects me to a very long URL (unfortunately) like https://sites.google.com/a/mydomain.com/sites/system/app/pages/meta/domainWelcome, which just says:

Google Apps

                  Welcome to
                 mydomain.com

If you are the domain administrator get started creating your home page with Google Sites

Great! I want to do that. So I click on the "If you are the..." link and end up at a screen where I can choose a template, a name, and some visibility options. If I click on My Sites, there isn't a "default" site, i.e. the one that www.mydomain.com displays. I figured that maybe I just have to create a site first, so I went ahead and did that.

My first test was to create a site that was publicly accessible. I thought that maybe if I did that, the Google would decide that this must be my home page since it's the only one. But it doesn't, and I still get the "Welcome to" page.

Under "More Actions", I didn't see anything interesting except for "Manage site". I went in there and had a peek around, and didn't see anything about using this as the default home page.

Am I looking for something that just doesn't exist? I can't believe there isn't a way to modify the "domain welcome to" page...