About creating sites

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Microsoft gives you convenient ways to create Web sites, including the following:

  • The SharePoint Central Administration pages or the Self-Service Site Creation page for creating top-level Web sites

  • The Create page or the Site Administration pages for creating a site under an existing Web site

  • Integration with -compatible programs such as and for creating workspace sites

Deciding which kind of site to create depends on the intended scope and use of the site. For example, you may want to create a top-level Web site for an entire organization and separate sites under that site for each team.

If you need to create a site to help manage the development of a shared document or file, you should create a Document Workspace site. A Document Workspace site provides a document library to share the file and other files related to it, as well as lists to help track issues and team member information.

If you need a site to share information and tasks related to a meeting, create a Meeting Workspace site. With this type of site,you can develop the agenda and objectives as well as maintain a list of attendees.

Self-Service Site Creation

If the users in your organization will need to create many top-level Web sites, you may want to use the Self-Service Site Creation tool. Using this tool is easy;it's similar to creating a subsite. If you want to control top-level Web site creation yourself, however, you can turn off the Self-Service Site Creation feature and create top-level Web sites on your users' behalf from SharePoint Central Administration. To create a top-level Web site outside of Self-Service Site Creation, you must be an administrator of the computer on which the site will reside or a member of the SharePoint Administrator group.

Creating sites from the command line

If you are an administrator of the server computer, or a member of the SharePoint Administrator group, you can create sites by using the Stsadm.exe command-line tool. To create a top-level Web site, use the createsite operation. To create a subsite, use the createweb operation.