Storing Data in SharePoint - Pages, Sites and Site Collections

by Andreas

Lists and document libraries are located in sites.

This means that a site can be seen as a container with lists and libraries:

For example:

A site can be a team site. Each team has lists and libraries to store contact information about team members, documents or events.
A site can also be a project site where each project has lists and libraries to store information about the project like its current state, presentations and calculations.

Sites can have sub sites and pages to represent a logical hierarchy:

For example a site can show office locations where pages represent the different offices:

/site/default.aspx, showing an overview
/site/berlin.aspx, showing offices in berlin
/site/stgallen.aspx, showing office from St. Gallen in Switzerland

A page is part of a site and actually a document stored in a document library. In this case the document is called “page” and has metadata like title, content, author and the document library is called e.g. “pages” where the pages are stored.

Summary

As you can see items and documents occur everywhere and can have different appearances even as pages.
Not every site can have the same kind of pages since pages are limited to the kind of available functionality in a site.

Here is a list of sites where you can create pages:

Template

Page Type

Collaboration Templates

Team Site
Blank Site
Document Workspace
Blog
Group Work Site
Visio Process Repository

W
W
W
W
W
W

Meetings Templates

Basic Meeting Workspace
Blank Meeting Workspace
Decision Meeting Workspace
Social Meeting Workspace
Multipage Meeting Workspace

W
W
W
W
W

Enterprise Templates

PowerPoint Broadcast Site
Document Center
Records Center
Business Intelligence Center
Enterprise Search Center
My Site Host
Basic Search Center
Fast Search Center

W
W
W
P
P
W
W
P

Publishing Templates

Publishing Portal
Enterprise Wiki

P
P

Note: In fact there are 3 types of pages: Publishing Pages (P), Wiki Pages (W) and Web Part Pages (available in all templates).

You can read more about sites at TechNet [3].

Summary

Just remember that there are pages which are actually documents in a library and that there are different types of them.
You can’t create a site under a page… you can only create sites below sites and each site can contain pages.

Site Collections

A site collection is basically a collection of sites with a root site at the top where the root site is a site like any other site. Additionally you can manage settings which apply to all sites in the site collection e.g.