Documentation Center

Designing Pages and Components

A page on a Web site typically contains: a design of the overall page, such as the banner, the name of the page, and navigation controls. and a design of the content on the page, such as articles, lists of links to articles, sidebar items, and so on.

The design of the overall page remain constant within a section of the Web site or across the entire Web site. The design of the content on the page are typically different from one page to the next.

In the following image of a Web page, the page design is highlighted in light gray and the content design is highlighted in darker gray:

Separating Page Design and Component Design
It makes sense to consider the Page Design and Component Design separately for several reasons:
  • You may want to reuse the same visualization of the content on pages that are visualized differently. For example, you may want a News Article to look the same on the Latest News page and on the homepage, even though the pages themselves look different.
  • You may want to reuse the same page visualization in combination with differently visualized content. For example, you may want the page part of the Articles page and the Products page to look the same, but visualize Articles differently from Products.
  • In SDL Tridion Sites, identifying pieces of content as separate entities is necessary if you want to link to them.
  • In SDL Tridion Sites, identifying pieces of content as separate entities is necessary if you want to store them separately on the published Web site, which speeds up publishing if you reuse the same piece of content on a lot of pages.
Integrating Page Design and Component Design
A good reason for integrating Page Design with Content Design is if the two should share a certain look & feel. For example, if different sections of the Web site have different color schemes, you may want to make the Component look green on a 'green page', and blue on a 'blue page'.