I had some stuff in my kb .may be it can help you
SharePoint sites vs. portal Areas
When planning for corporate environments such as an intranet portal or sharepoint site, you need to consider some of the differences between a Windows SharePoint Services site and a SharePoint Portal Server portal area. An area is a means of publishing and aggregating content using a navigational taxonomy, whereas a SharePoint site facilitates collaboration of team members using collaboration objects and custom lists. Users have unlimited view and editing access to the portal areas; by contrast, SharePoint sites are only available to members. Individual users can personalize a portal area in more ways than a SharePoint site.
Moreover, areas are based on the Windows SharePoint Services framework and offer a set of unique templates. You can determine whether to use a portal area, or a SharePoint site by deciding first what you intend to do with the site. In general, use areas and portals for information publishing, and SharePoint sites for online collaboration.
Create SharePoint sites when you want to collaborate across projects in the following ways:
· Sharing and retaining versions of documents
· Scheduling
· Delegating and sharing tasks
· Handling presence and messaging
· Sharing and targeting information
· Managing meetings
Create areas when you want to publish information such as the following:
· Aggregated listings
· Target audiences
· Content for publishing
· Document postings
· Navigational taxonomy
· User profiles
· Lists
· News
· Managed spaces for users or subject-matter experts
· Areas of subject expertise
· Community interests
· Subsites for a categorized set of documents
With the union of SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services, you can integrate SharePoint sites and areas to create custom environments that target a particular interest group. For example, you can publish related content created from collaborative projects on several SharePoint sites to an area, encouraging information sharing and easy access to relevant information.