Creating sites and site collections from the Site Directory enables an administrator to add sites to the portal site that are not typically part of the main navigation of the portal site, yet are needed by a team or a unique group of users for collaboration, publishing content, or setting up a workspace.

The Site Directory also enables you to organize sites by business function rather than by portal hierarchy. You can use Site Directory categories to organize sites and site collections to reflect your organizational structure or product line.

The choice between creating sites or creating site collections depends on your organization's requirements; however, site collections provide a number of benefits that subsites do not:

• You can keep your portal site in one database and then put the site collections into a separate database.
• You can limit the size of sites by assigning a quota to every site collection. For example, you can specify a 5 megabyte (MB) limit for each site within a site collection. Without a quota, users can build sites that adversely affect performance.
• You can enhance scalability. Although the main portal site can hold up to 2,000 subsites, your system might have performance problems as the number of subsites increases. By using site collections, you can build up to 1 million sites without adversely affecting performance.

 Note    To set up site collections, you must enable self-service site creation. To do this, in Central Administration, click Application Management, and then in the Application Security section, click Self-service site management. On the Self-Service Site Management page, select the Web program for which you want to enable self-service site creation, select the options you want, and then click OK.

1. On the Top Navigation bar of the portal site, click Sites to open the Site Directory.
2. On the Site Actions menu, click Create Site.

   To create a site collection, you need to change the site URL to the site collection URL. In the Address bar of your browser, replace newsbweb.aspx with scsignup.aspx

3. Type a title, description, and URL for the site or site collection.
4. Choose whether to use the same permissions as the parent site or to use unique permissions.
5. Choose whether you want to link to the site on the Top Navigation bar.
6. Select the site categories in which to display the site. If you do not categorize the site, the site will not be listed in the Site Directory.
7. Select a template to use as a basis for the site. If you are unsure which template to select, click a template name to view a description. Then click Create.