Site vs. Communiuty

Question

I need to develop a consumer facing site which will allow customers to login and view and update information. I have multiple 'groups' of customers and for each I want to have a different branding of the pages.

I though of using a single template and multiple CSS which will dynamically assigned based on the type of customer.

My main concern is whether to build this using a Community per customer type i.e. with Site VF pages with my own design OR to build it as a Site with VF pages which will be dynamically assigned a CSS.

What is the best / recommended practice for this Use Case?

Answer 1

It depends on how you are grouping your customers based on their types (different Profiles extending the default Community profile/different Role in the Account) but a Custom Component with some backing logic and some <apex:outputPanel/> tags in the view with apppropriate rendered attributes and child <apex:stylesheet/> tags would work.

Also note that a Salesforce Community comes with a Site by default.

Answer 2

Communities can be customized by associating them with a Site and then adding customized VF pages. This will also help you to enable your users to login to the site using the security framework of the community.

As mentioned in the answer above you can customize the branding by rendering based on the type of customer. For example you can have an Apex:Component which contains different branding in the headers and footers.

You can also build a Force.com site without security. The default site user profile will need to be configured for access to the various objects and pages. There are some limitations such as this user does not have access to Chatter APIs for example.