Web standard for www or no www?

[shaunhussey]

I am having difficulties trying to express that we should make our domain accessable via http://domainname.com as well as http://www.domainname.com. I recall there being a website that wrote extensively on the pros of making sure your domain works both ways and how it should be SOP to do so. Does anyone have a link for that? I tried to search for it but came up with nothing.

[JPnyc]

Can't say that I have a resource for you but I don't see why it should require one. Shouldn't that be common sense? I mean if you own a domain and you want people to be able to get to you as often as possible, then it just makes sense to make that as easy as possible. I have my error page set to my index page on my server, so no matter what they type in, they get my index page.

[David Harrison]

There is no standard, but the www. is not actually required. My host allows me the option of allowing/blocking access to either of them, however it makes sense to me to allow access to both.

In fact, what I did was to set it to redirect all visitors to domain.com to www.domain.com in my hosts control panel, just because I prefer the look of a www. in front.

There is a cinema web-site that I sometimes check, but without the www. all of the images fail to load which makes it look completely broken and there's also a PC hardware site that will simply fail if I try and access it without the www., very frustrating.

Generally I will access all .com, .net and .org sites using the www. because there is a keyboard short-cut for my browser that will add a www. and a .com/.net/.org onto anything I type in, but for .co.uk sites I usually omit the www because it's less to type in. However, I don't see any reason to turn away users because they left out 4 characters.

[etechdesigns]

IMO, you should redirect the traffic to one of them. You can also go through the review on the subject at this link. http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?:)showtopic=5644

[marlyred]

There is some good information about the pros and cons, and how to redirect one to the other here (http://rainborick.inpacifica.com/seo-tips9.html)