Site Collection & Site in SharePoint 2013

In this article we can explore Site Collection & Creation.

What is Site Collection?

SharePoint is a web platform. A site collection represents a collection of web sites. A site collection consists of a Top Level site & sub sites.

In real world scenarios a site collections is created by the SharePoint Administrator for departments or sub-departments. A site collection helps in grouping contents of similar behavior.

What is Site?

A site represents a web site where you will be having a home page, view contents, edit content, share documents, perform search etc. Following is a screen shot of SharePoint site.

An example scenario would be Accounting Site Collection where each year is of separate site.

How to create a Site Collection?

We can create site collection using Central Administration.

Central Administration is another web site used for managing SharePoint applications. You can launch Central Administration from the Start Menu.

Please follow the step-by-step instructions to create a site collection.

Step 1: Open Central Administration from Start Menu

Step 2: Click on the link

In the appearing page, enter your credentials to login in & click on the Create Site Collections link.

Step 3: Enter the Site Collection Details

Site collection creation should provide details like:

1. Title
2. Description
3. Url
4. Site Template
5. Administrator
6. Quota

You can enter this information in the appearing page as shown below:

A site template provides a quick start option. For time being choose the Team Site template. The quota limit can be used for restricting growth of Site Size.

For Primary Site Collection administrator, enter a valid user name. You can resolve user names using the associated icons to the right side.

Click the OK button to create the site collection.

You will see the following progress update:

After the operation is completed, you will get the following message:

Step 4: Open the New Site Collection

Now we can open the new site collection by clicking the URL shown in previous page. Please note that the URL will be different for each site collection.

Following is the URL created:

http://win2012/sites/accounting

Please note that your URL could be different.

Top Level site will be automatically created for each new site collection. In the above case we are seeing the top level site.

Now let us see how to create new sites.

How to create a Site?

Sites are created by the Site Collection Administrator. For creating a site, please follow the step-by-step instructions.

Step 1: Click on the settings icon

In the right hand side of the page click on highlighted icon below:

You will get a popup menu.

Step 2: Click on View Site Contents menu item

In the popup menu, click on the View Site Contents menu item as shown below:

Step 3: Click on the new subsite link

In the bottom of the appearing page you can see the new subsite link as shown below:

Step 4: Enter the new site details

In the appearing page enter the details for the new site.

You can enter Title, Description, Web Site Address in the fields provided. You can also choose where the link to new site should be displayed. (Quick Launch on left side, Top Navigation bar)

Select the site template as blank. Click OK button at the bottom of the page to perform site creation. Following is the new site created.

Please note that the URL is following:

http://win2012/sites/accounting/2013/

You will have links to this new site in the site collection > top level site.

A site can contain multiple sub sites under it with nested levels. The URLS will follow the pattern as:

http://server/sitecollection/site1

http://server/sitecollection/site1/site2

http://server/sitecollection/site1/site2/site3

References

http://bit.ly/10uiVpB

Summary

In this article we have explored about Site Collection.

In real world governance scenarios the SharePoint users has to go through approval policies in creating site collections. Usually it is the SharePoint Administrator who performs site collection creation