WordPress: Subdomains Vs. Pages

Creating Pages

You can quickly create pages from within your WordPress dashboard. These pages can contain text, images and other codes. While PHP is not generally accepted in WordPress pages, you can install plug-ins such as PHP-Exec to enable PHP on your posts and pages. WordPress will maintain an index of all your pages and you can create pages as children of other existing pages. You can save pages as drafts or publish them immediately and, if your theme is set up for it, pages will automatically appear in your website's navigation. Pages will generally have a URL of "http://yourblog.com/page-name."

You must access the control panel of your website host. Many hosting plans include unlimited subdomains but you should check your package to determine if you can create as many subdomains as you require. You can give your subdomains custom names; however, your host may limit the number and type of characters you can use in your subdomain. Subdomain appear simlar to "http://subdomain.yourwebsite.com." Essentially, a subdomain is another website but you could use it as a section that is part of your overall site.

By default, WordPress creates posts and pages in the directory where you it installed it. The blogging script is not able to create pages on separate subdomains. Thus, you must either install multiple WordPress installations to use across several subdomains or install WordPress to the subdomain where you wish the pages to appear. You can maintain multiple WordPress blogs by using multiple subdomains and/or domains as long as you use unique names for the WordPress tables for each installation.

If, for whatever reason, you want a WordPress page to direct to a subdomain or vice versa, you can do so with redirection. There are several methods to consider. You can add 301 redirects with an HTACCESS files. These redirects instruct the browser to load a different page when the visitor tries to access a certain part of your site. 301 redirects are search engine friendly. You may consider meta redirect tags as an alternative. These tags belong inside the "<head>" of your HTML document so they may not work in the body of a WordPress page. However, you can use them to direct your visitors from a subdomain to a page powered by WordPress.