Essential SharePoint 2007, 2nd Edition

Best Practices

You should now understand how to organize sites using web applications, site collections, and subsites. You should be able to customize the navigation and appearance of a site, add tabbed pages, apply themes, and create custom site templates. Use the following practices as you move forward:

• Add a Help tab to the top-level link bar of your site collections. The built-in SharePoint Help system provides the basic instructions most users need, but it is not featured in the default site navigation.

• Check existing sites before creating a new one. Often new site requests will fit into an existing site.

• Broad sites are more usable than deep hierarchies.

• Create a site collection for any set of related sites that might need separate storage or administration in the future.

• Build a site gallery containing demonstration sites for each built-in or custom site template. That makes it easier for site collection owners to choose the template that fits their needs.

• Add the Site Users web part to an Admin page so site owners can easily view existing users and add new ones.

• Prototype sites and get agreement from users before creating custom templates based on the site. SharePoint is ideally suited for Agile development.

• Include a version number in custom template filenames and titles.

• Save the custom templates you create to a Templates folder, and add a Templates folder to the server for all custom templates you deploy using the stsadm.exe utility.