To www. or not to www.?

[Moldarin]

Hi,

I am wondering: to www. (http://www.yes-www.org/) or not to www. (http://no-www.org/)?

What are your views on having or not having www. infront of a Website's address?

Personally I redirect all traffic from http://www.thewebdesignjournal.com/ to http://thewebdesignjournal.com/. I think it is better to use shorter URLs.

[Stephen Philbin]

www. is just a subdomain like any other. You could use world-wide-web.domain.com, web.domain.com, public.domain.com or whatever you like. There are plenty of people out there on the web that rage against the use of www. regardless or whether or not you have any other public or private subdomains, but I can't see the point myself.

I see the question of whether or not to use a www. subdomain for web content as pretty much irrelevant.

[NogDog]

The important thing, in my mind, is to be able to handle either when a user inputs it in their address bar, e.g: http://www.charles-reace.com/ and http://charles-reace.com/ should both work. Whether you choose to redirect one or the other is largely immaterial to me as a web surfer, and probably to 99.9% of the rest of the web surfers out there, as we're all used to seeing it.

[Stephen Philbin]

The important thing, in my mind, is to be able to handle either when a user inputs it in their address bar,

Yup. That's exactly how mine is set up too http://dootdootdoodydoodydootdoodoooo.com/?media=html and http://www.dootdootdoodydoodydootdoodoooo.com/?media=html both work for my domain. Apache doesn't care which you use and neither do I. Quite why those folks on either side of the argument care is beyond me.

[Grayback_87]

In my opinion, www. is more generic and therefore looks more professional. All of the newbies out there might get confused about typing that address. For me, typing www. is automatic. To each his own, I suppose.

[Moldarin]

But don't the end user appritiate shorter URLs?

And the do not break as easily in e-mails...

[Stephen Philbin]

I never type in the www. manually unless it's required for some reason or another. Though why those no-www loons put foward such a pointless argument, I don't know. You'd think if they wanted to rant about something pointless, they'd look a few characters to the left for an equally pointless, yet slightly more supportable argument. I would have thought the fact that most of the data sent via the hypertext transfer protocol is not actually hypertext, would have them incensed.

[ulillillia]

I've always used the WWW. I do so because it helps maintain compatibility as far as I know. Though I'm not sure, removing it would require the use of a subdomain. Using an IP is another option, but not recommended as not only do IP addresses change, but they also tend to be used for phishing scams and the such as they can hide the domain and stuff. Although it does save four bytes in the file size per link (and in bandwidth), it does have a use here. After 1000 such links have been downloaded, you've freed up enough bandwidth usage to download a 4 KB image for free (in a similar scenario). It does add up.

[swachtma]

Pick your favorite and forward the other to your choice. I don't see any reason it should be more complicated then that. Except maybe that the WWW gives you a little protection against sub domain phishing. for example you have your site at myubersite.com I could set up a subdomain myubersite.phishyou.com (maybe a little more subtle then that though...) and then try to phish user information from the unsuspecting.

using a WWW though I don't think this could be done because the subdomain takes the place of the WWW.

[CMIT Andrew]

I have a similar problem. I work in the corporate office of a franchise system. Previously, our franchisees' websites were located at something like this: http://www.ourfranchise.com/franchiseewebsite. We've re-launched our site and are now using subdomains, so the same site now is: http://franchiseewebsite.ourfranchise.com. Here's my problem.....some of our franchisees are complaining they can't get to their sites if they enter http://www.franchiseewebsite.ourfranchise.com.

I personally would never enter a www before a subdomain, but novice users don't understand this. Is it possible to configure the web server so it can resolve this issue? The main reason we need to address this is because some franchisees are reluctant to use a domain name that doesn't start with www on their business cards and other marketing collateral. We've set up redirects so if a user enters http://www.ourfranchise.com/franchiseewebsite it redirects to http://franchiseewebsite.ourfranchise.com, but I don't know if we can do anything about users who manually enter the address as http://www.franchiseewebsite.ourfranchise.com.

Any ideas?

[Moldarin]

You cannot enter www. infront of a subdomin. :/

[CMIT Andrew]

I know that and you know that, but the novice user doesn't. Is there a setting you can put on the server (a redirect?) that will deal with the novice users who don't know any better and end up manually entering an address like http://www.subdomain.actualdomain.com?

[lourdes]

I guess is appropiate www. is the way computer is working.