I need to develop a SharePoint solution that has many layout pages, ten sub sites to be exact. Each department wants to have its own slight variation on the three layout pages proposed at the beginning of the project. Therefore I am going to have a lot more layout pages that I will have to create now ten instead of the original three. I really wanted to have a restricted number of layout pages.
I was going to go the aspx user control route and have simple custom controls for each region on the layout pages. I have found this to be a lot simpler to deploy and pages load a lot faster than having too many web part on the layout pages but then I lose the flexibility of using web parts.
In this solution I am consider using a combination of user controls and web parts to help cut down the number of layout pages I want to deploy but still provided some flexibility to the end users.
My question is, is it best to use web parts as part of your SharePoint solutions? Can having too many web parts on a page affect the performance and speed at which a page is loaded?
Using aspx user controls is the asp.net way of web development and therefore easier to produce but when is it best to use aspx user controls in a SharePoint solution?