No-www.org
I recently changed the way teamryan handles the www prefix. Both teamryan.com and www.teamryan.com have worked in the past. Both still work but www.teamryan.com now redirects to teamryan.com in the browser address bar. It’s a cleaner, easier, and more logical way to handle a website address.
No-www is a site that shares that philosophy.
No-www.org strives to make the Internet and communications about it as fruitful as possible. To that end, we make the modest proposal that website makers configure their main sites to be accessible by domain.com as well as www.domain.com.
According to no-www teamryan now validates as a class B domain.
Class B is currently the optimal no-www compliance level. This classification helps remind users that, while the www subdomain is accepted, it is not necessary. In Class B, www.example.net is a valid address, but it redirects all traffic to example.net.
The wikipedia article on no-www gives some counter arguments. Though valid, in most cases the no-www philosophy is preferable. Adding www to a domain is awkward, unnecessary, and often confusing to less experienced internet users.
Perhaps the most perplexing counter argument is the following:
One of the biggest concerns for dropping the www. subdomain is that your average user may be unable to identify that it is in fact a website, unless it’s specifically mentioned. For example, in the media: www.example.com can be easily identified it is a website, however example.com may not be identified by some users as a real website.
First, I tend to give more credit to the “average user”. Secondly, if more websites were accessible and promoted without the www it wouldn’t take long until example.com became the standard. Is it more confusing for users to have a standard or random url protocol?
The prefix www is not required for teamryan, just as there is no need to add index.html at the end. That keeps things simple, and simple is good.
