Blogging Discussion: Do you use WWW?

As a general rule, I do not use the www-prefix on my own domains.

Neither do I type it, and this sometimes brings interesting results.

A surprising number of websites returns an error page, if you type the URL without http://www. Not just personal or hobby websites, but some belonging to large cooperations as well.
My worst example is one of the largest political parties in Denmark that for the first week of a four-week election campaign returned an error message if you type the party name without the www-prefix. Not even a custom made error message pointing visitors in the right direction, but a standard server error message.

Personally I like the “www” beginning. While I don’t type it into Firefox (I let it autofill) when I am actually looking at a domain I like the balance of the 3 letters at the end (.com) with the 3 at the beginning (www.) which to me just “looks nicer”. Weird, I know, but there you go.

Classically, I think, people are also used to a http://www. beginning to a domain. I think if you miss it off less savvy Internet users might wonder why and what was going on. Trust is important.

Just my 2 cents…

I’m not sure it matters that much. If articles are to be believed everyone just types the name into Google don’t they?

I prefer to leave off the ‘www’. It’s just not necessary unless the server is set up wrong. BTW, here is code you can put into an .htaccess file (if you use the Apache webserver) to automatically redirect visitors who type in ‘www’ to the same address without the ‘www’. This is a better setup than having duplicate content at both addresses.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.brookstonepark\.org$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://brookstonepark.org/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

The lazy developer in me says four extra characters that serve no purpose needs to be left out, so no http://www. for my sites. I love that WP automatically redirects whatever version (www. or non-www.) of the domain is instantiated in the settings.

Just a sidenote to the comment of Doug.

Of course, when copying&pasting the code provided by Doug, you’ve to replace http://brookstonepark.org/ with your own domain name
ciao
alex

I’m using it. Honestly, I never really asked myself which one I prefer. With 301 redirect, nevermind you type www or not, you’ll see the same website.
Thanks Doug for the usefull Apache tip

I don’t usually use it but I do notice that people at work who are less tech savvy than I do. I’m not sure if I prefer it one way above the other… I think it’s just more of a shortcut thing. I do notice that some webservers don’t recognize having no subdomain as defaulting to www which means I have to go back and correct it manually (kindof a pain)

I don’t use the “www” unless it’s in an email.

The real question is: Would you use it in offline marketing? I do.

I use www only for websites oriented to people who dont have a well knownledge of the internet, for that people is better to give things as easy as possible
And is a good practice for marketing too…

But for technical sites I use always an address without the www (adding mod_rewrite rules to convert address for those that put the http://www.).

I hate using http://www. I’ve been meaning to do something about it on my sites, so I added Doug’s code above, and it looks like it’s working fine.

How can we make it not use the www from the get go of a site? Is there a redirect or something?

Haven’t used it since the ’90s

Kyle, I don’t use the www because not using it makes the domain look shorter in my opinion, and shorter domains have more authority(not from search engines, just visitor impression), generally speaking. That’s my thought!

I’m still use the www,it seems to i should remove it.

I never use www))

Seems my code was altered by the comment form. There should be a dollar sign before the ‘1′ after the last domain name, so it would read out loud: “domain name, slash, dollar sign, one” I hope that’s not too confusing!

And thanks, Big Blogger. Yes, please change the domain name to your own; don’t redirect your visitors to my site!
Let me try one more time:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Nope, the dollar sign got stripped again. Maybe Kyle could fix it? (Sorry for the multiple posts.)

I don’t use it. And I find it annoying when webhosts don’t setup their server to resolve the domain without http://www. in front of it.

I knew some guys running an ISP in California and none of their webhosting clients domains were setup to work without http://www. in front of the domain name. I had some clients who hosted with them and I would call and bitch at the network admin to get it fixed. I thought it was just plain lazy to be honest. They said their script they used to setup the domain wasn’t programmed to do it and they never took the time to fix it.

Either way, most people probably never noticed and I imagine the average end user types http://www. automatically.

Hey Kyle, wanted to say that I borrowed your topic of discussion and created a poll on Performancing asking if people used WWW or not http://performancing.com/do-you-use-www-your-domain-name the results are almost 50-50.