How to Write a Chrome App for your Website in 5 Minutes?

Even if you have not written a Chrome app for Google Chrome, you can write a basic one easily and that too in a short span of time, i.e., just 5 minutes! You can write an app to create an icon and also can make it a link to take you to any of the websites. Besides, you can make it function like a bookmark. You can also write a script to develop an extension. This does not consume much time. This also makes the functionality great. You can add an icon through this extension and use it to view the websites and blogs viewed recently. All recently published stories can also be viewed this way. Since Google Chrome is a very popular and efficient web browser, it is very useful to make your presence there. You need nothing more than basic HTML knowledge for this.  Moreover, knowledge of CSS and java are helpful too. Here is how to write a chrome app for your website in 5 minutes.

How to write the Chrome app:

You need to download the sample chrome.app.zip to your desktop to start off. Then you need to extract the archive and

1. Open manifest.json file. This is included in the downloaded file
2. Open this in Notepad
3. You can also use any other text editor to open the manifest.json file.

There are a few modifications required.

1. Add your website name
2. Describe your site in less than 132 characters.
3. Replace your website name and URL at required places.

Before you do the changes, you need to make sure that you are the owner of the site. Also, get this verified with Google Webmaster tools. After this, you would need to create an image of 128*128 of your website logo. Save it in the same folder and name it as icon.png.

Publishing the web app:

Next, you need to publish the same in Chrome.

1. Create a zip file and include icon.png and manfest.json files
2. Go to Chrome Dashboard
3. Upload the zip file
4. Create a screen and add description, screenshots and default language
5. Pay $5 of Google registration fees
6. If you do not wish to publish this on Google, then you need not pay the fees
7. Add the appropriate meta data and your app is published in Google

Creating Extension for your site:

1. Download chrome-extension-zip and extract the contents
2. Include your name and extension in manifest.json file
3. Include your URL and RSS feed at appropriate places
4. Pull the files in a zip
5. Upload in Chrome Dashboard
6. Add appropriate meta date

This completes the process and your extension goes live in Chrome.