I begun to create layout pages for a group of sites and am struggling to understand out of the box usage. I created two layouts; one for Publishing Content Types and another for Page Layout Content Types. They work fine, but if I begin to create a web part page within the browser I don't see an option for the layout I created. If I choose a Publishing page, I do see both options. Am I being confused by semantics here? One is Page Layout and the other is simply Layout.
With that in mind, how may I create web part page layouts that I can choose within the browser? Additionally, if Publishing is turned off for a given site collection, may I still provide my clients custom templates for web part pages (even wiki pages) or do I need to create custom content types from scratch? Thanks!