UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN River Falls
When you are authoring content you are working in the "authoring" environment. You will see authoring menus and the URL will look something like this:
https://www-auth.uwrf.edu/commonspot/dashboard/index.html#mode=author&url=/CBE/Index.cfm
(Notice the https://www-auth.uwrf.edu/ portion of the URL.)
However, the page the visitor sees is https://www.uwrf.edu/cbe/Index.cfm
When you submit your changes to the page they are delivered from the authoring server to the production server. When a visitor requests the page they see the latest change.
The website is www.uwrf.edu. A subsite is the website your office or department maintains. It's the "folder" that holds the pages, documents and images. In this URL www.uwrf.edu/cbe/ , "cbe" is the subsite for the College of Business and Economics.
In this URL www.uwrf.edu/registrar/ , "registrar" is the subsite for the registrars office.
A child subsite is a subsite within a subsite like this https://www.uwrf.edu/CBE/Centers/. A child subsite has its own navigation. The navigation features a (+) plus-sign that when clicked expands the navigation menu to reveals links to the pages inside child subsite.