The Importance of WWW
I visited a site recently where, if you just type in the domain (like beforeyoulaunch.com) it does *not* work, requiring you to type “www” at the beginning. This is a horrible awesome sin in the web world, as most of your customers will not bother typing the www, it will never occur to them when they get a “404 not found” error that this is the problem, and will assume that they have your address wrong.
Before You Launch, make sure this works! Your hosting provider may even have a control panel where it will ask you that exact question – “When people visit domain.com do you want to put the www in”? Whether you actually require the www has more to do with web server configuration and is somewhat geeky, but anybody can test and make sure that both ways work!
Another site I frequent is about to go live, only with “site.blahblahblah” instead of “www.” Highly uncool. We’re working to get that fixed before he gets his business cards printed! Once he gets that fixed I may ask his permission to use him as an example of some other things we can all work on.
“Subdomains”, as those are called, do have a purpose. If you have a legitimate reason to subdivide your traffic, it’s perfectly reasonable for example to put the primary site on “www” but then maybe have your discussion boards be off on the “forums.blahblahblah” subdomain. Another good one is the popular deal-a-day commerce site <a href=”http://woot.com”>Woot.com</a>, which recently created <a href=”http://kids.woot.com”>Kids.Woot.Com</a>. This is acceptable because at least people know that just typing “woot.com” gets them to the main page. Imagine if every web site out there had some random dictionary word at the front and you had to remember whether you’re supposed to type kids or blog or forum or site … Forget that!
Juggling subdomains with your primary homepage is also dangerous game to play with regard to your search engine optimization, and I’ll point to my own self as an example of stuff you can get caught up in. For my other site ShakespeareGeek, both versions work — shakespearegeek.com by itself, and www.shakespearegeek.com. However, if you notice they actually redirect to blog.shakespearegeek.com. This is because the site started as a blog, and I always tell myself that I will grow it into something larger. Thus, I reserve the top level domain for future growth. I need to get off my butt and change that.
The problem is that when people link to me, half of them are linking to www.shakespearegeek.com (the ones that type it in directly from memory), and half are linking to blog.shakespearegeek.com (the ones who cut and paste it from the URL). I don’t know for certain what Google and the others do on the back end in this situation, but it’s pretty safe that it’s working against me at least a little bit. The solution to this problem is to have www be a real site, not a redirect, and simply include the blog content behind the scenes (using one of those Ajax/widget tricks we’ve spoken of previously). That way everybody ends up pointing to the same URL, and I get the maximum bump from the search engines.
