Designing the Site and Site Collection Wireframe

A sample wireframe is provided in Figure 21.1, which is a simplified design often used for medium-sized companies (500–5,000 users) and includes a top-level site collection for intranet purposes, separate site collections for departments such as IT and HR, and a site collection for cross-departmental uses (such as projects).

Figure 21.1. Sample site collection wireframe.

This simple example shows a ContentDB icon for the top-level site collection, which in this example contains intranet content, and ContentDB icons for three other site collections that are nested beneath the top-level site collection. Each organization will need to work on balancing the depth of the structure with its breadth, because a structure that is too “deep” can be hard to navigate, as can a structure that is too wide. There are management complexities involved in creating too many site collections, whereas on the other hand, too few site collections may result in content databases that grow to “unwieldy” sizes (for example, hundreds of gigabytes, or even a terabyte or more).

A tool such as this makes it easy for design committees to understand the logical design and can be expanded to include the lists and libraries that will be included in each site, and the permissions for each site, and thus become a useful management tool.