SharePoint sites vs. Site Collections - CONFUSED!

Hi Oz,

If i may offer some personal experience which may help.

I have for the past year been installing/developing SPO for my organization.

1) Adding sites/collections from the admin centre for a Top Level site, this gives good foundation for permissions management which is, imo, up there as a top priority.

2) Sharegate (as mentioned by Dean_Gross) is a really good tool, which gives great fluidity to your environment structure. I have ahd to restructure an SP2010 environment as my first SP experience, and Shargate made the job very comfortable. It also supports many forms of reporting and migration.

3) From a 'Sharepoint Freshy' point of view, having a site/project purpose clear (ours is collaboration due to the nature of the business), and sticking to it is crucial. MS provide so many solutions for so many situations.

Finally, i prefer to have a URL structure /sites/region/dept so that there is an order to the chaos. When you create a site via the Sharepoint Tile, its added to the root by default, so unless you are creating a subsite (and then the URL is beneath the upper site), you will need to migrate the site. OR a Top level site is required, from the Admin centre.

New to the forums and advanced dev of SP, but hopefully the above is of some benefit.