We're using joomla. The new project is with joomla 2.5, and the old one is joomla 1.5, which will take a while to upgrade, because of all those plugins and some plugins not working with the brand new joomla 2.5. But, we can make the template very similar to each other. Some plugins don't work well with each other and the SEF plugin. Both sites are quite huge, not the average size site.

This isn't a blog. We have created a social site for our website. I know that a folder would be better in general, but for this we needed a different plugins, extensions, template, etc.

So, we have www.mydomain.com. We created a social.mydomain.com.

I guess, we could create a folder called "social" and put our social website under that.... in that case it would be called www.mydomain.com/social, and just put a link there from the main website.

The 2 sites have different menus and have different templates. We will be updating the main site template soon to the new template, but they are still different. But that isn't really the main issue.

If we had transferred all the files into a subfolder,

1. Do you think it would be professional to have the social site there with a different look?

2. We bought the domain name: mysitesocial.com. Would that screw up SEO if we forwarded that domain to www.mydomain.com/social or social.mydomain.com and built links to that?

I appreciate your help!

I just created a subdomain to help our main TLD website. I was wondering if it's smart to create a separate TLD for this subdomain and set up a forward and build links to it.

Reason I was thinking about it because it would be easier for people to remember instead of typing in subdomain.maindomain.com.

But, I don't want the main website to suffer, since the purpose of creating this subdomain and it's content is to help the main domain.

Any inputs on this? Thank you.