Building Customer Portals Via Force.com

I recently started playing around with force.com sites a lot more than usual as a means to build a customer portal for a new business I am starting with a few friends. I thought this could be a good avenue since I could create a customer portal that easily integrated with our CRM instance. And since I understand the language and given the ease of Visualforce technology the turnaround time would be rather quick.

Here is the layout of the force.com template:

(showHeader should be turned off so you won't see any Salesforce standard tabs or sidebar)
<apex:page showHeader="false" id="SiteTemplate" standardStylesheets="true">
(A section is reserved for header of the site)
<apex:insert name="header">
<c:SiteHeader />
<hr/>
</apex:insert>
(This section is where you can include the content of each page of your site)
<apex:insert name="body"/>
(A section is reserved for footer of the site)
<apex:insert name="footer">
<hr/>
<c:SiteFooter />
</apex:insert>
</apex:page>

The developers that I spoke to in my network recommended that follow the same pattern when developing my portal.

Things that should be included in the 'SiteHeader' component is the logo, log in and out links, headlines, and site navigation menu (This is done with code snippets...either extracted or some cases newly written). The same way, you can modify the 'SiteFooter' component to add your site's pages footer template. It is also recommend to include your site's shortcuts links and your company copy right message in this section.

Adding the shortcuts links  in the 'SiteFooter' section is very important...particularly if you want to utilize organic search. If you are using dynamic menus this will easily compensate for that.

Next post will demonstrate how to add new pages to the force.com site.