Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

why 'www.' in URLs?

Author:James R. Dezendorf
Posted:2/4/2000; 12:34:36 PM
Topic:why 'www.' in URLs?
Msg #:14925
Prev/Next:14924 / 14926

I was just wondering why many organizations forbid or discourage the use of their URL without 'www.' on the front of them.

Some examples:
http://audi.com [doesn't resolve]
http://cmgi.com [doesn't resolve]
http://useit.com [doesn't resolve. bad Jakob, no cookie]
http://shopping.com [doesn't resolve]
http://ebay.com [reroutes to www. after refreshed jump page]

I'm OK with sites that do an invisible redirect, eg. av.com to www.altavista.com, or yahoo.com to www.yahoo.com.

Is less typing always better? I know this convention came out of organizations that had a lot of other named machines before they had web servers, but the fact is that web traffic rules all right now. I'm sure some marketing people could give me a line about 'branding' but creating a barrier to finding your home page seems like a bad idea. Also, I think it might be a safe assumption that a user typing in just your domain is looking for general info.

Of course I've also heard that setting things up to work with either is a pain in IIS, so that could be part of the problem...



There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:54:16 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.