It means that:

http://www.brunobraga.net/home and
http://www.brunobraga.net/Home

are different, as the image shows.

If you check Wikipedia explanation page, this is not the same, because:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipedia

both goes to the same page (actually the incorrect is redirected to the correct PaScAl CaSe URL format).

This is a short one... Simply because Google Sites by default creates the page name based on its title, it does not mean the URL (or the page name) should be the same. In fact, this can become annoying if you start creating sub-pages within sub-pages. The easiest URLs to remember are usually short, clean, and "human-readable" user-friendly.

So, if your page is called "This is my first page in Google Sites", it does not necessarily mean that you need to leave your URL as: http://sites.google.com/a/{your domain}/this-is-my-first-page-in-google-sites. Naming pages is almost like giving a name to a product, to be simple, easy to remember, and something would mark and call attention to your viewers.

The "Home" page

By default, all sites in Google Sites start with that one, and once again, case-sensitive as "Home", not "home". Moreover, because of the breadcrumbs, people tend to leave all pages of the site under Home page. This seems ok in logic, but the URL will look like: http://sites.google.com/a/{your domain}/Home/my-next-page

As I wrote, it still looks ok, until you start thinking about the meaning of the breadcrumbs, and the logic of page and sub-page. In my understanding, a sub-page MUST be part of the page, or contain information that is more specific than the page itself, and/or complements it. If your page talks about cars, the sub-pages should contain information maybe about manufactors, but not about fruits or food. It simply makes no sense. So, be wise to determine the hierarquy of your pages.

Intuitively, the breadcrumbs and page hierarquy should  be based on general to specific navigation flow. The simple idea is to go deeper into pages that only are specific to the page above it, following a concept similar to:


Each topic underneath is then part of it, and can not be, in any way, a different topic or content. If you find that your page does not fit to this style, you will need to revise your page location. The good news is that moving pages is not so hard task to do at Google Sites (just go to More Actions > Move).

So, the tip here is to avoid leaving pages under home page.

A better breadcrumbs structure has been proposed to Goole Sites Team, covered in Google Sites Help Group, here.

Announcements

To the main announcement type page in Google Sites, you may follow the same of the above for web pages. I will take a moment to discuss about the Posting in announcements pages.

Announcements are NOT Blogs

For many different reasons, announcements pages are not the same as blogs. They may, however, look similar, if you just know how to use it. However, simple features such as public comments are not available just yet (but being requested by many, as commented in Google Sites Help Group, here). Some people already created their own workaround for that, such as using Forms from Spreadsheets. I consider the workload still too much, and rather wait for Google to release this one. But it is your choice, of course.

The fact is that, even for the posting, the page naming is similar with the web pages. Once you create the title, that you be about the page name which is automatically created for you, with one problem, you may not write your own title and choose the page name at once, like the web page scenario.

Here, for posting, you will need to first create your page the way you want, and then later rename it to fit to your needs.

Some good practices on how to name your pages come next:

Announcements as Blog

Oh well, if still you want to use as a blog type page (I am doing that, lol), there is no problem, as long as you understand that you should keep your page names with a date prefix or suffix, which will tell when you created that. Blogs also tend to do the same. Blogger uses the standard http://{your blog}.blogspot.com/{year}/{month}/{page title} to properly put pages in period wise hierarquy, which makes total sense for contents posted based on datetime (journal, news, opinion, etc).

For Google Sites, you can not use sub-pages (actually you can, but it is just too complicated) in your Announcements, so the suggestion is to create something like: http://sites.google.com/a/{your domain}/{announcements page name}/{yyyymmdd}(optional: -{title})

For example, in my personal blog, I use:


Specially because I will hardly write two posts in a roll, but if I do, I would follow the "-{title}" style, like a usual blog, and we would have a nice blog style in Google Sites.

Announcements as gathered contents

If you are using the Announcements page just to place related information, like I am doing with Linux Geek and  Google Sites Help Announcements pages. For example, this current page's title is: "Page Naming Conventions in Google Sites", that does not mean that my post should be named as: page-naming-conventions-in-google-sites (update: Google Sites is now removing the dashes automatically, making the name like: pagenamingconventionsingooglesites... wow, even worse!). So, I named my page with a simple name which denotes what it is about: "naming-conventions", and that's it. But keep in mind this is a manual thing, and good sense is the key... I always go for the KISS principle in this kind of moment.

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