I am working on a website for a photography business in town and was asked to do something I'd never considered before. The company wants a basic webpage for it's "general" business -- example.com, let's say -- and then a subdomain for each of their specialties: weddings.example.com, portraits.example.com, etc.
They specifically requested that Wordpress be used and want a different theme on each subdomain. What makes most sense to me with this setup is using multiple Wordpress installations, one for each subdomain, and interlink between them with the menus and trackbacks/pings.
The last thing I want is to negatively affect SEO with this. It seems like it should boost each individual subdomain/site. But at the same time, the root domain is the same, so it could actually drag the entire thing down.
What are your thoughts on this?