I just set up a new Drupal installation for a site I'm working on and I have to choose to have a "www" in the URL or not. For now I've decided against it, because it will keep things simple for me when I implement subdomains. However, I have heard some things both for and against the use of "www" in regards to SEO. Also, there's the question of aesthetics and whether it's more popular for users to type it in or not (as I have found, my tech-savvy friends generally don't type it while it's more common among those who are less technically inclined). What do you think? Is "www" dead?
doesn't really matter, imho. www.site.com and site.com should both lead to the same place anyways, unless you want to piss off your customers/users
Voted yes, but I agree with supertoad, it needs to work either way. What drives me crazy are the people who will get to a site by going to google and typing the URL of the site into the search box
Personally to me it matters not, however if I was for example to give an address of site.com to my father or sister, they would instinctively put www. before it, there has been a number of times that either of them had an address as such and complaind it not to work because the server did not support www. , so I guess it depends on what your intended audience is.
It actually really annoys me when sites don't have their DNS records set up correctly, so you MUST HAVE www before them. For instance, empirecinemas.co.uk doesn't work, but www.empirecinemas.co.uk does. If there were any other cinemas in the area, I'd go there just because of that.
you should have www in front and that should be your site domain dns name but site.tld should work too best thing is to put a redirect on site.tld to www.site.tld imo, but thats often hassle
You should be available on both, but for SEO use only one. I.e., bit-tech.net/hardware will forward you to www.bit-tech.net/hardware and send a "301: permanently moved" header.
RTT - you're bang on in my opinion. Just been talking about this with a mate of mine who i'm setting up a site with, so quite good timing for this debate
Aaaaargh I f***ing hate that! Every friend i've seen recently browsing the internet does that. I seriously feel like hitting them when they do that. Also, i hate that none of them seem to know how to use a search engine properly. It wouldn't bother as much because I can't expect every one to know how search engines work but some things just seem like common sense to me: like don't bother typing in words like "the".
We've got a bit of an issue with our domain... when we set it to have the www (with dreamhost), we end up in an infinate loop so the page wont load. Anyone able to help us with this?
www.mydomain.com is more "obvious" in advertising or letterhead, especially if it's aimed at the general public. Don't confuse them.
have the domain on the server, with nothing infront of it and add an "A" record for it (www) on the server. www. is a subdomain just like any other subdomain. an example from the BBC they were saying bbc.co.uk (without the www.) on some of their programmes, They had it so it would only load with the www. in front of it. Eventually they sorted it to load either way.
Yeah, I'm planning to have any requests to www.flaglerama.net redirect to flaglerama.net (that's the site, btw). Since there will be a lot of subdomains off of this main domain I think it's easier just to omit the www in the first place. An address like "www.beta.flaglerama.net" is just too damn confusing. But of course I'll redirect and advertise appropriately - pulling a stunt like BBC's is just... dumb.
Yes, but by forwarding (two lines in .htaccess if it matters to you). Having both exist in parallel rather than having one forward to the other is terrible for SEO. Just pick one and go with it, but don't let both exist. I like it for the way it looks and use it across all my sites. It also, in theory, adds some sort of 'definition' to what part of the site you're accessing. But that really only matters if you were to do ftp.yoursite.com, etc for all the different protocols. I just stick with folders, since forums (etc) are part of "www" imo. But it really doesn't matter, just be consistent.
If it doesn't load with both www.mysite.com or mysite.com then I simply wouldn't visit it. It's insanely annoying having to put the extra www in when you don't usually type it.
The website we use for our Bio A level has to have www. in front of it. I hate the site anyway so I dont use it.
just a little point here, this forum thread has highlighted a possible problem with omitting the www. in that when you type a website address into any page as-is or into word processing programs, then site.com will be seen as text only, however www.site.com will turn into a hyperlink automatically. If you intend to quote your website in forums and emails etc, then you'll have to use http://site.com or use html tags to get a clickable hyperlink. Otherwise people will have to type it manually or copy and paste the link into address bar. yes, I know it's a picky and slightly lazy point, but it's something to point out... personally, I like Opera's way of offering "go to URL" in the right click menu if you highlight text! I'm also a fan of not having to type out the www. every sodding time I want to load a website!
Usually when entering URLs into the address bar I just type the name and press ctrl+enter, for example I type google and press ctrl+enter to turn it into http://www.google.com/.
Interestingly enough, I just got my "Happy Birthday" email from Bit-Tech (yay! and thank you) and the link was http://bit-tech.net, without the www.
