The fish fry needed a website, not a project

The sign at St. Adalbert's fish fry is a piece of plywood with the phone numbers painted on. The menu is a PDF that Mike, who runs the Knights of Columbus kitchen, texts to whoever asks. Every Lent somebody puts the parish name in Google anyway, finds nothing, and calls the rectory. The rectory lady told Mike, quote, "I don't run the fish fry, I just answer for it."

Mike asked me what a website costs. I told him the truth. It costs one Tuesday evening and about eleven dollars a year.

I built his page on Google Sites, which is free with a Google account. He edits it himself on the phone while the fryers heat up. Listen, most community things don't need a builder, a budget, or me on retainer. They need one page with hours, prices, and a map.

What it is, what it costs

Google Sites is the website tool hiding inside your Google account at sites.google.com. It's free, forever, with no trial clock and no card. The whole thing runs on 18 templates and a drag-and-drop editor that a middle schooler can work. Reviewers give it good marks for exactly that and ding it for the same reason. Very basic customization. Little integration with anything outside Google. No selling tools at all.

The only real cost is a domain name if you want one, and a fish fry wants one. Mike owned nothing, so I bought stadalfishfry.com at Cloudflare Registrar for $11.09 a year, at cost, because I move every name I can over there. Connecting it took one CNAME record pasted into the dashboard. Ten minutes. Google hosts the page free behind it.

Total bill: $11.09 a year. Zero a month. Storage is the one ceiling. Sites counts files against Drive storage, which is 15GB free, and a site caps out at 100MB of its own uploads. Menu, four photos, a map, and the Easter bake sale flyer comes nowhere near that.

How I built it for Mike

1. Sat down in the church basement with Mike's Google account and opened sites.google.com. Picked the simplest template.
2. Typed the menu, the Fridays, the hours, and the two phone numbers off the plywood sign. Inserted a Google Map of the parking lot so nobody parks on the lawn again.
3. Uploaded five photos off Mike's phone. Real ones, steam on the lenses. Real photos beat stock photos every time, even blurry ones.
4. Published, then added the CNAME record at Cloudflare for the real domain. Waited out lunch for the record to catch.
5. Added the whole kitchen crew as editors. Google Sites edits live, like a shared doc, so four guys can update the soup of the week without emailing anybody.

That took two hours including the drive. Mike has made every menu change since, from the kitchen, on a phone with flour on it. If he can do that, your crew can too.

The thermostat version

Here's the honest limitation. The Google Sites editor is a thermostat with two settings. Hot and off. You can set the temperature the dial allows, and that's it. There's no duct to reroute and no humidifier to wire in.

That's a feature for Mike and a dealbreaker for the next guy. If your business needs its own booking system, a store, or your brand colors exactly, this isn't your tool. It's a simple dial on purpose, and Google isn't pretending otherwise. When a client outgrows it, the page exports or the text gets copied, and we start over on a real builder. Nothing wasted but an evening.

What to do Monday

Pick the thing you announce by flyer, text, or yelling every single week. The supper, the rummage sale, the league signup. Build its page on Google Sites tonight in twenty minutes with the real hours and the real prices on it. Before you buy a domain, before you call anybody. Just get the plywood sign on the internet.