So your boss approaches you and says, “That SharePoint site you created for our dept., is great! Can you duplicate the site for all our depts.”? At that point you hit the palm of your hand on your forehead and say to yourself, “now if I could only remember how I did all that, and I wish I would have taken notes”.
Take a deep breath and read on…
Creating a SharePoint Site Template
Navigate to the site that you want to save as a template
In the upper right click on the wheel, select Site Settings
Under Site Actions Select Save site as template:
Give it a File name / Template name / Template description
Select include content only if you want to include the content of the site that is being saved, click ok
Wait for processing to complete:
The following will appear if completed successfully
This next part is how to create a site from the template
Navigate to the main SharePoint site ie…
In the upper right click on the wheel and then Site Settings
Under Site Administration Click on Sites and Workspaces 
Select create
Give the site a Title and description.
Enter a name for the URL (no spaces please) ie.. TestSite should not be Test Site
Select the Custom tab, custom Template
Select Unique Permissions
Select yes for Navigation and Navigation Inheritance, click Create
The following message appears:
Next are the Site Permission groups, the defaults are a good place to start, click ok
Congratulations you did it! The new site has been created!
