What is a SharePoint site?
Before getting into the details of what is a SharePoint site one must be having proper permissions and in case if you are unsuccessful in creating a site then you should seek help of administrator. A SharePoint site consists of three levels:
1) Top-Level Website
The default level is the top-level website which is supplied by a web
server. In order to open this site you only need to provide the site URL of the
server such as http://my_server – without
mentioning the site, subsite or page name. Administrators change settings of
the whole site collection by going to this site.
2) Subsite
It is basically a website that is saved in a sub-directory of the default website (top-level). The subsites are independent from the default sites as well as other subsites which means they have separate browsing permissions, administration, and authoring. Moreover, it can have subsites of its own and the reason is, every site under the top-level website is in fact a subsite which is generally known as a site itself. In order to open it up, you need to provide the URL to the server in this manner: http://My_server/My_site — without mentioning the page name.
3) Site collection
As
its name implies, it is a group of sites on a particular web server having the
same owner but shared administrator settings. Each site collection come under
one top-level site however, can have more than one subsite at the same time. On
each server, there could possibly be a number of site collections.
Whenever a SharePoint site is created it is created under
the top-level website or else existing subsite. Moreover, those who are not
administrators cannot create top-level sites unless Self-Service Site Creation
feature is not being turned on in WSS 3.0 (Windows SharePoint Services). Once
it is turned on users can make new top-level websites together with site
collections without any administrator permissions.
In sum, the above mentioned information tells about what really is a SharePoint site and what you can do with that. It is currently being used by thousands of people all across the world. Some are using it as MS SharePoint web applications and some are using it as a tool, the purpose vary from person to person or company to company. It can be said that SharePoint have changed the way people used to think before in order to execute their processes.