Inside Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0

Master Pages

One of the most tedious aspects of customizing and branding sites in WSS 2.0 has to do with creating a consistent look and feel across pages. The root of this problem is caused by the fact that ASP.NET 1.1 does not provide an effective page-templating technique that can be used to define a common layout across the pages within a WSS 2.0 site. As a result, many developers and designers working with WSS 2.0 and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 have resorted to copying and pasting HTML layouts from page to page. As you can imagine, this makes it very hard to customize and maintain sites whose layout requirements differ from the out-of-the-box experience you get with a standard WSS 2.0 site.

When master pages were introduced with ...