Overview Of SharePoint Online Page Types

Welcome to an article aout an overview of SharePoint Online Page Types. I have described some basics in the first part of this article,

Overview Of SharePoint Online Page Types - Part One

Application page

Application pages are used to support application operations in SharePoint online or On-premises versions. In the case of Office 365 SharePoint, it is used to store to the cloud, which is maintained by Microsoft. If we are using SharePoint On-premise application, the pages are stored on the file system of the front-end Web Server at the "%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server" location. Creating an application page is quite difficult compared to all the above categorised SharePoint online pages.

For more details about Application Page, go through the below URLs.

Master Page

SharePoint Master page is a chrome type page that provides us the interface and overall layout of the pages on a SharePoint site - the common element of all pages, like header, navigation links, Site Actions menu, and so forth. They are placed in the same areas regardless of the page you are viewing. We can see default page of any SharePoint site and some of the SharePoint site pages are very different from one other. So maybe, you will think how SharePoint has different style pages with customized requirements.

Note

Master page gallery and page layout gallery are nothing but Document Libraries.

Below is the screenshot of SharePoint default page and customized page.

Default page of any SharePoint site will look like the below screenshot.

Here, we can see that the Header, Footer, and Navigation page is defined. So, the below layout is fixed by default and we cannot change the interface of this page. However, to change an interface, we need customization in the Master page.

Customize the site page of SharePoint to make it similar to your requirement.

In SharePoint Online, we can check the Master page from "Site settings" of page. And, we can select master page and page layout from web designer galleries.

From the master page and page layout page, we will get a list of folders and files where all the pages and layouts are defined.

To check more about master page, look at the below demonstration from MSDN site.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj191506.aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn205273.aspx

One of the awesome articles is on the internet will solve most of your doubts.

Let us see how we can change the Layout of SharePoint page or customize from default page.
To change anything, we need an application called SharePoint design. We can open our site and make modifications as required. To open SharePoint designer, click on site page, enter the Site URL, enter password when prompted, and wait for some time. Once all set, the Home pageof SharePoint site will appear on the Designer.
Here, we need to select the master page, and click on Seattle. Master. It will open the page in edit mode where you do your own customization and save the same.
We need to publish to same to take effect on the site.

SharePoint tip

The difference between a web part page and wiki page is that if there is an edit button on the top of the page, you have yourself a Wiki page. By default, our team site page is a Wiki page where we can edit and modify the page.