How to use PageLayout in a SharePoint Site?

Question

I am kind of new to SharePoint. I am learning it on the go and learned about the concept of pagelayout and publishing features on the site. But I am not really 100% sure what is the difference between a WebPartPage, SitePage and PublishingPage. I kind of know what all these pages be used for, but what I not get is: why do they need to separate all these pages?

I think we can just get a publishing page and have all the feature there including webpart and everything else (with our choice of PageLayout). However I dont see a way to use a pagelayout on a particular SitePage.

Is there any particular reasons for using either one of them? Even though it seems like one of them can serve as all of them?

Answer 1

You should use page layout when ever you know the page structure. For example you are running an online news paper. You want to show the news to the users into three columns. First column is for menu, second column is for news content and third column is for advertisements. Now in your daily usage this layout is common. So you can use this page layout for entering the news. After creating the page layout you can make it as a default to your pages. Page layout is nothing but the structure of a page simply!!

Answer 2

A webpart page does not have a field for content directly on the page like a SitePage has. A Publishing Page is like a SitePage, but requires extra fields for dealing with the publishing extra features. Using a single layout for all three risks being confused as to why one page does not work the same as another when it has the same layout (the difference would be the underlying features are different.).

Answer 3

I will make a comparison with cars. There are three type of cars, each is better suitable for a certain purpose: tractors for farming, buses for public transport, light cars for private transport. You could use a tractor for all the purposes above but it's not ideal.

"One of them can serve as all of them". This is not true in their current implementation. I'll give you one example: prefer Web part pages against Publishing pages to better control content added by contributors in an intranet. There are many other examples.