[Solved] Integrate WordPress or Install on Subdomain?

[bricko]

Hi, I’m hoping that people much more experienced than myself can give me some helpful advice.

I’m mostly finished building my site and I want just one section of it to be a blog. I just started converting the site into a WordPress install at http:/blog.beltlinebuttons.com and it’s going fine so far. This subdomain of http://beltlinebuttons.com is just for testing out the conversion and then I was going to do the real thing on the main site. In the process I got to wondering… do I really want to turn my whole site into a WordPress site? I only want the "blog" section to have the WordPress functionality and the rest will remain pretty static with updates once in awhile. I’m thinking that maybe I should just have the blog on the subdomain of http://blog.beltlinebuttons.com and make it look like the rest of the site so it doesn’t look like the user is navigating away. I realize that if I change the footer, etc. that it’ll be a little more work since I’ll have to do it on the subdomain manually.

Is there any disadvantage to this? It seem to make sense to me and I’m just not sure what the advantages to having the rest of the site running off WordPress.

I hope I made this clear and someone might be able to tell me the advantages of one over the other.

Thanks so much for your time.

[bricko]

Those examples look great. Now that I’m sure I won’t be making some huge mistake, I can go ahead on forge on with this. :D

Thanks so much for the reply and input! I really appreciate it.

[AshtonSanders]

I will throw in my two bits:

Google sees different subdomains as different websites.

example, searching Google for "websitesinaflash"
will bring up my main website: http://www.websitesinaflash.com
and my subdomain blog: websitedesign.websitesinaflash.com

So as far as search engines are concerned, these are two "smaller" websites as opposed to one "larger" website.

If you want to take over the top 10 spots for an "easy" keyword, subdomains will work fine. If you are focusing on just getting visibility on a "hard" keyword, I’d recommend sticking with subfolders.

If you don’t care about the SE’s… ignore that ;)

(I will probably switch my blog, above, to be a subfolder… eventually…)

[Author]

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