Subdomains from a usability perspective

What setup are users most comfortable with?

[ThatAdamGuy]

Hi there.

I founded and run a site that's a funky hybrid between a 'personal homepage' and a general fun-sorta-site, and my HUMOR section is particularly popular.

Though the humor content currently resides at [mysite.com...] I'm considering moving it into a subdomain (http://humor.mysite.com), both for the (what I perceive as likely) improved search engine rankings and also for the hypothetical boost in brand awareness sort of stuff.

I'm aware that there are various search engine optimization issues associated with this, and I've already made a separate post [webmasterworld.com] that touches largely upon those issues.

However, there's one significant issue I'd like to tackle in this thread: When are subdomains the 'right answer' in terms of usability considerations (both for my visitors and myself)?

1) RECALL
Is your average user more likely to remember topic.somesite.com or somesite.com/topic? I'm guessing sometopic.com would beat both of the above, but that's not an option for me at this point.

A year or two ago, I'd have said this was a no-brainer; subdomains were, IMHO, simply not common enough to be comfortable for the average user who was accustomed to everything starting with "www."

But now? With manysites.about.com and lotsofthings.yahoo.com, for instance, I'm guessing that subdomains are at least recognized and understood by most Web surfers.

2) ACCESS BY SITE VISITORS
With folks so trained to type "www.something.com"... will people be more apt to correctly type in a subdomain over a subdirectory or visa versa?

3) UPKEEP BY WEBMASTER
Right now, it seems like -- from a Webmaster perspective -- subdomains are a pain in the rear. Are there any ADVANTAGES of subdomains in the area of site maintainance?

Are there any other issues regarding subdomains (other than SEO) that I have neglected to touch upon here?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts :)

[korkus2000]

As far as usability goes, I would think that a subdomain would be easier to use. I have not seen any studies about this though. I do know that deep pages are hard for users. I think there is a point where a url is just too confusing. www.mydomain.com/humor and humor.mydomain.com is really not that big of a difference. Now if it were www.mydomain.com/misc/fun/humor then the subdomain is going to win hands down. So my opinion on the matter is I don't see one having really any advantages over the other in usability from your example.

[joshie76]

When it comes to usability I'd personally go for www.example.com/subdomain/ everytime.

It has the built in failsafe that if they forget the subdomain, they still only have to remember the domain and they'll (hopefully) be able to find what their after. The subdomain could potentially confuse the user about the root domain.