With or without www, that is the question…
A few years ago I was asked to work with a political party and advise them a bit about their internet strategy. The first thing I did was type their name + .NL into my browser to check their website. They had a pretty big campaign advertising their website, all with just ‘domain.nl’ on everything. You can guess what happened. No website, just a ‘Document not found’ page…
If someone tells me to visit ’somedomain.com’ I open my browser and type in ’somedomain.com’ and hit enter. Sounds logical?
Not to some people. They ALWAYS enter ‘www.somedomain.com’.
And some some server administrators think that everybody ads the ‘www’ before their domains and they don’t bother to set up their server to work with and without the ‘www’ before their domains.
I hate that.
In a lot of cases ignoring the ‘www’ get you not to the website you want to go but to a general Apache error page, or even worse, someone elses website such as the hosting providers homepage or a different client on that particular server.
I mentioned this to the person I was working with and told him it would be a 5 second fix and would dramatically improve their website and lead to more visitors. At least it wouldn’t frustrate any visitors trying to get to their website. I was quite pleased with myself with being able to help them with his.
After two weeks the issue still wasn’t fixed. I called my contact and asked him what was going on. He replied ‘well, we have talked about it during our technical meeting and the server administrator was busy with other stuff and decided it wasn’t a priority and that most people know that you should just add “www” to our domainname’. For a moment I was speechless and then I told him that it would be very difficult for me to do any work for them if I couldn’t even get this one thing done.
And that was the end of my advisory work for them.
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6 Responses to “With or without www, that is the question…”
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sometimes i think that the leave the www option just to frustrate me :)
a while ago i wrote an e-mail to http://www.drempelsweg.nl/ becouse theire site won’t work without www http://drempelsweg.nl/ while this site is ment to take care of this kind of “problems”
A good example! I just don’t understand why people like that don’t just fix that…
Funny, I posted a comment about the www issue to the website of drempelsweg.nl and this is what I got back:
s.damen@lbt.nl
(generated from sanderdamen@drempelsweg.nl)
SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO:
.damen@lbt.nl>:host mail.lbt.nl [82.168.7.66]: 550 5.1.1 User unknown
Bunch of amateurs…
drempelsweg get money to fix this kind of thinks!
Story of my life. I always try to advice people how to get things done right on internet. Thy always want to find out themselves. Or not find out at all.
btw, Maxthon users (like me) get pissed quite often from this error, since Maxthon many times doesn’t want to load sites in domain.com format.
Really amazing how come such a tiny but critical nuance in usability still exists.