On MK Publishing Firm Beta a.k.a. beta.mkforlag.com, a subdomain to the main domain www.mkforlag.com, I try out new ideas and develop new pages and new layout for the main domain.
Another purpose of MK Publishing Firm Beta is to find out how subdomains work and how they DON'T work.
What are the pros? What are the cons?
A google search on subdomains pros cons gave conflicting answers, including these:
What to do? Simply try, try again and try once more to find out what's true and what's not true regarding subdomains.
It seems it will take more time before new pages are indexed by Google if you use subdomains instead of subfolders. Not until June 6, 2010, eleven days after I published the two pages (a Swedish startpage and an English one) on beta.mkforlag.com, the English startpage but not the Swedish one have been included in Google's index. When I publish new pages on the main domain www.mkforlag.com, they have usually been indexed after two or maybe three days.
It seems search results for subdomains are listed separately. At least according to two google searches I made June 27, 2010, about a month after I started beta.mkforlag.com. The first search (on site:mkforlag.com) returned 120 hits for mkforlag.com and 4 for beta.mkforlag.com. The second search (on site:beta.mkforlag.com) returned 0 hits for mkforlag.com and 11 for beta.mkforlag.com.
You can use the same CSS files as on the main domain. At least as long as you use an absolute URL, like http://www.mysite.com/style/main.css.
The future plans for beta.mkforlag.com are still rather vague. Right now, I do whatever I want to do for the moment without thinking that much about whether the result will be good or not. Expect, therefore, that the pages on beta.mkforlag.com will be slightly less thought through than on the main domain www.mkforlag.com and more or less developed, from idea to more or less ready to be published on the main domain.