Which do you prefer?

www.somedomain.com or simply somedomain.com ?

The use of the WWW (or variously: wuh wuh wuh, dub dub dub, dubya dubya dubya etc.) in domain names is something of a debatable subject.

A colleague recently stated that people feel more comfortable browsing a site which uses the www prefix – a “fact” which I initially dismissed as an irrelevant personal preference. I’ve always treated this issue from a techie standpoint and it’s never occured to me that people might have a preference.

The Technical Standpoint

It is fairly normal these days for a site to respond to domain.com in exactly the same way as www.domain.com, in many cases the www prefixed address will be redirected to the non-prefixed version.

The historical reasons for using the www prefix are outlined by Tim Berners-Lee here.

It is a convention. I suggested it early on, in this guide, and I am of two minds about it now. An alias was a better alternative to “pegasus.foo.com” which typically resulted when someone who happened to have a machine called pegasus started to run a web server for foo company. (The www prefix on a computer name also allows one to guess that it was a web server. This allowed early estimates of the numbers of servers, for example.) In those days I suggested an alias www.foo.com for the HTTP server in line with existing Internet practice of ftp.foo.com for the FTP server and mail.foo.com for the smtp server, and so on. These aliases could, even if originally on the same machine, be moved to point to machines of appropriate size as necessary.

You don’t have this flexibility of configuration is you point everyone at “foo.com” itself for all services. Typically early webmasters could not have comandeered the “foo.com” address itself.

The no-www project has this to say on the subject:

By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the ‘http://’ onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.

Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.

Jeff Atwood finds the whole debate rather amusing:

Readable URLs are important, but you should be far more concerned about the content behind that URL than the URL itself.

The overall consensus is that, for a technical point of view, it doesn’t matter whether you use www or not, just as long as you pick one approach and stick with it. If you want to use the www prefix then it is best practice that your website will redirect requests that do not include the prefix and vice versa.

The User Experience Standpoint

Despite all of the web techie discussion and debate over which (if any) approach is best. It doesn’t answer the question raised by my colleague that “people feel more comfortable browsing a site which uses the www prefix“. As I stated, I’d dismissed this as an irrelevant personal preference – however I quickly realised that in order to deliver a good user experience, personal preferences need to be taken into account. To this end I began canvassing on Twitter to see where the tide of opinion was heading. Unfortunately nearly all of the people that I talk to on Twitter are also somewhat technically minded and the non-www route appeared to be the favourite.

There may be a case that a website visitor who visits a site listed in printed collateral as www.domain.com will be slightly unnerved if the site redirects to domain.com – particularly in light of widespread warnings over phishing scams.

This is where I’m hoping that some non-developers will give me their opinion. 

What do you think?

Thanks to @paulfabretti, @Rich_Clark, @leekelleher, @mattrhodes, @barthox, @dav_hamill and @AndyMHolt for taking part in the discussion and pointing me to some of the sources cited in this post.