Subportal vs. Standalone

Question

Greetings,
The following is a brief summary of the project at hand:
My company has a subdivision who's website (www.jabsco.com) has been built and maintained by an external consulting firm. Now they are seeking to move the site under internal control. While the guys at the subdivision would be happy if we just moved the site and db onto internal servers, the IT honchos here don't want to support the current application. Instead, they want to rebuild it in .Net and they are considering how the portal can be utilized.
(side note: the current site structure is very poor. I imagine that a better model of similar functionality is the Volvo Group's website (www.volvo.com)).
What my question is, being farily new to Plumtree (our dev environment has only been up a month or two), what is the right approach to implementing the solution? Create it as a subportal? Or create it as a standalone site which uses "output" from the portal?
I've been thinking of two options:
1) Build it as a standalone ASP.Net app that is independent of the portal. However, the static content would be created and managed via Content Server (publishing to a directory). So the sections like "About", "Company Profile", "News" and such would be from the portal while the other key items like the product and distributor catalogs would be from a standalone app with a portlet interface for input in the portal.
2) Build it as a subportal. I suppose this is a good solution. The problem is, this is a costly solution in terms of time. The amount of work involved in creating a highly customized look and feel using the portal seemsto be extremely high (I could be wrong). On top of that, tons of research has to go into howto customize the look and feel the way we want (any chance of getting an implementation guide for www.plumtree.com?).
Thoughts and input?

Answer 1

I looked at the two sites and they both look like they would be relatively easy to implement as a subportal because they use page layouts that already exist in the subportal.
You can use a completely null-navigation scheme (copy the null navigation scheme that ships with the portal and remove any navigation elements from it)
Use communities, sub communities and community templating to create the site structure (use subcommunities rather than community pages because they are easier to work with through the PRC)
Have a banner portlet that uses the PRC to query for the top level communities and uses transformer tags to link to the communities (home, company profile, product information etc.)
In the case of volvo - Use another portlet for the sub-community navigation in the left hand column.
You can make it feel more like a website by decreasing the spacing around the portal (see NavigationSettings.xml)
After the initial setup branding and customizing the site would be easy because you can just change the banner/footer portlets, stylesheet, and make changes to community templates to push changes out to all the sub-communities.
Hope this helps.