no-www Vs. yes-www
Sunday, June 28, 2009 by Brian Kusumawan
This is an article to give a fair response of some articles posted on www. is deprecated.
Let's begin, it's interesting!
Let's begin, it's interesting!
It is actually a good question to critically reconfirm the Internet users about how important "www" really is. I therefore would like to bring two points into surface in order to critically analyze this issue.Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain?
Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate.
- Efficiency
Being efficient is always related to numbers, especially time. So, how much time do we save for not typing "www" in an URL?
Yes, it is indeed faster to type an URL with no "www" into your favourite web browser. Moreover, it's a logical thing!
Let's start critically thinking! - Effectiveness
How easy can a website be remembered without "www"?
Of course, it is much easier to memorize shorter website address(s) and it is well proven that deprecating "www" will give longer impression to its visitors as number of words or characters they need to keep in mind is lesser. In other words, human brain only spends smaller amount of memory to be used.
On the other hand, the issue does not just end up right there. How about their familiarity with the so-famous-word "www"? Some IT professionals might totally understand how Internet works so it means they are pretty sure whether or not "www" is absolutely neccessary in an URL. However, what about others? Non-IT-specialized mates out there?
What is really happening?
We have to confess that Internet is always identic to "www". That particular public thought is caused by one habit which is not completely proven to be right. But it really does happen to be right! Everytime most of us access the Internet, we begin with typing "www" followed by the website domain in the Internet browser address bar. This regular activities keep on bouncing every second, every minute, and every time!
What do we have in turn? Internet equals to "www" (Internet = "www"), and it becomes a Syndrome! In result, it affects most of Internet activities and indirectly it becomes a habit.
We cannot clearly conclude that as either good or bad habit, but it is the situation we currently have where Internet users cannot take out "www" from all of their online activities. This is where a very wise consideration of deprecating "www" needed so bad.
Idealism Vs. Realism
Yes, it is about idealism and it is about technological science as well. Internet domain (widely known as website address or URL) is only described as word(s) or phrase(s) located infront of its top-level domain (.com, .org, .net, etc). "www" is just actually to indicate that the full URL are located on the World Wide Web network, but technically means that it is a sub-domain.
Jumping to conclusion, we have to be realistic. Again, we have to bare in mind that such Syndrome as mentioned does exist! It does not leave so much pain if we probably lose our traffic just because we follow the no-www philosophy for our individual website(s) (non-profit), however, traffic means a lot when running online business(es).
How to Do Good Practice?
Good practice we need to think of is a strategy that conveys both of the followers which means that the same destination will be reached if online visitors access the webpage with or without "www". It also prevents visitors from mistakenly miss the "www" sub-domain and from a business perspective, we may say that customers are always in hand!
Another good practice is to build a good domain structure so that website visitors will be subsequently informed the clear domain structure a website has. For example that this website has http://www.briankusumawan.com as its homepage. In other words, it is the main page in where the visitors will land on. Additionally, it also has http://contactme.briankusumawan.com where "contactme" becomes a sub-domain in which visitors can find more details about contact addresses.
This hierarchical structure may also be considered as a good practice when developing a company websites that runs more than one business.
i.e.- http://www.companyname.com
- http://business1.companyname.com
- http://business2.companyname.com
- http://business3.companyname.com
- etc.
- http://no-www.org/
- http://yes-www.org/
- http://www.answers.com/topic/top-level-domain
- http://www.answers.com/topic/subdomain


