One of the biggest challenges that you will face when launching and rolling out an Intranet is stopping the intranet from sprawling. Ensuring the structure is maintained is a big job especially when users can create sites for collaboration or projects or customers. If you have customers and projects the engagements usually stick to a certain pattern and so does the files and information that is needed for that engagement. So for each new project creating a site for that project should theoretically be in a similar format to every other project. Documents usually take the same format such as quotes, change requests, bug reports etc and these are usually based on a standard company template. So wouldn't it be great if you could create a new site with all this structure setup and the documents templates available already when creating new documents.
Save the Site Template
The first step of this process is to create a site template and only allow users to create sites based on this template. Supposing we have a site that we want create a template from. In that site select "Site Settings" from the "Site Actions" menu. Under the "Site Actions" heading there is already an option to "Save site as template" You then get some options to save the site template. In this case don't include the content.
Restrict the site templates that can be used
In the site that you want to use the template select "Site Settings" from the "Site Actions" menu. Select "Page layouts and site templates" from the "Look and Feel" section.
From the next screen you can select the templates that you want to restrict the user too by clicking "Add" .
That is it, for a further step if you have multiple projects per customer you could get this working for a customer and projects under that customer.