1. Claire Williamson Platinum

    Web manager at Lloyd's of London

    27 June 2008 16:49pm

    avatar I am interested to know what people think is the trend with regards using www in their web addresses these days? Am increasingly seeing domain.com/feature rather than www.domain.com/feature and wonder if others think this is likely to become the new best practice?
  2. Anthony Sharot Silver

    Search Marketing Director at http://www.marketappeal.co.uk/

    27 June 2008 17:57pm

    photo_of_Anthony.jpg The habit of using www. probably caught on in the web's early day's when it helped to identify web address and when redirects were less widely employed and so these details mattered.

    Today, things have changed a bit. We all now know that anything ending example.com/pagename is a web address, and these days almost all sites work just as well with or without the www. making it more of a branding issue than anything else.

    Further, as short, memorable domain names become scarcer, site's are dropping the www. not lease because it ads three to four characters to the url, which users will then have to type in (or at least think they will).

    Personally, unless you have a short url, such as www.google.com, I think that the www. suffix is largely unecessary, and possibly a distraction, especially as it's showing idential content anyway.

    Anthony

    Search Director
    Market Appeal


    On 16:49:29 27 June 2008 ClaireLowe wrote:

     

    I am interested to know what people think is the trend with regards using www in their web addresses these days? Am increasingly seeing domain.com/feature rather than www.domain.com/feature and wonder if others think this is likely to become the new best practice?

     

  3. dj barker Bronze

    Online Marketer at Large

    30 June 2008 11:51am

    avatar hi, Claire, how are you?

    Boring History Bit:

    The habit of using www. probably caught on in the web's early day's when it helped to identify web address and when redirects were less widely employed and so these details mattered.


    It was actually from the days where a subdomain would denote an actual individual machine. The mail server would be mail.domain.com, the web server would be www.domain.com .


    Are People Really That Savvy?

    I do a lot of work for an American dotcom company. For countries outside the US, they use the domains 'uk.domain.com', 'fr.domain.com', etc.

    I work with several members of their web & e-business teams, and each & every one of them will type in the URL as 'www.uk.domain.com', even though all this does is redirect to uk.domain.com .

    ie: these people have worked with the web for many years & are still under the impression that they have to type 'www' to get to their own website.


    The Actual Answer To Your Question

    A wishy-washy answer, but: I think it depends on your primary audience, brand recognition & context.

    eg, if your website is clairelowe.co.uk & you're aiming at a non-tech-savvy audience, I'd always go for www.clairelowe.co.uk . If you're talking about johnlewis.com in a radio ad, I think "visit johnlewis.com" is going to be fine.

    If it was my company, I'd either
    1. Stick with www - it's safest & there can be zero confusion
    2. OR: test it & see what happens

    Summary

    Unless there's a good reason to ditch it, or you have the opportunity to A/B test it, just keep the www & forget about it.


    I hope that helps!

    daniel
  4. Michaela Carmichael

    Account Director at Openface Internet UK Ltd

    06 July 2008 23:22pm

    avatar We are nearly there; i.e. not using www, but sadly a lot of sites still don't have their domain settings set up to deal with no www being used.  So give it a year or less and then it will take off.  However, if your site is set up to deal with no www, then save the page space on your promotional material!  The savy users know all about not using the www...
  5. Claire Williamson Platinum

    Web manager at Lloyd's of London

    07 July 2008 13:38pm

    avatar

    Thanks both - appreciate your advice.

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