I worked on a WordPress site for a client which required the creation of microsites.
Each microsite collected together all the content about each supplier from all over the site. It had been hacked together using a large amount of plugins, tools and widgets which meant it took about a day to set up a microsite for a new supplier and required a whole heap of knowledge about the system.
I will talk about some of the tools I used to bring the setup time down to around 30 minutes with the added benefit of consistency, including custom post types and a great plugin called posts2posts.