This question has arrived at my feet a few times now.
Sould I participate with http://no-www.org/ and remove support for www. on my sites?
The answer is no you shouldn’t whilst I appreciate and do belive www. has become deprecated, a LOT of end users still use www. So by removing support for this you are excludinga potentialy large user base from reaching your website, can you as a business afford to do that … of course not!
So what _should_ you do?
In my opinion, add support for both.
You will see that http://saiweb.co.uk and http://www.saiweb.co.uk BOTH work, this allows both “classes” of end users to reach my website, and I have applied this principle to all sites I have recently worked on.
Example httpd.conf entry
ServerName saiweb.co.uk
ServerAlias www.saiweb.co.uk
DNS for saiweb.co.uk is an A record to the IP of my webhost and www.saiweb.co.uk is a CNAME of saiweb.co.uk
This method however does not http://no-www.org/ validate as www. subdomain still exists, so don’t expect a “no-www” validated image to appear on my blog anytime soon.
www. may be depreciated, but businesses can not afford to exclude any potential customers, so don’t expect this no-www to become standard anytime either.
“July 2, 2008
Today we passed 38,000 domains validated through no-www. This is a nice round number so it seems worthy of tooting our horn over. ”
As I write this there are 77,343,623 active domains (source: http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/) making the no-www support less than 0.05% of active domains.
I would be intrested to know how many of this 38k domains are actual businesses, and how support no-www has affected thier online sales.
I can tell you however of the 300 or so domains I currently controll, non would no-www validate as they are all configured using the method above.
Thoughts?
Entries (RSS)
Very interesting read, however your site configuration is weird…
You say you have ServerName saiweb.co.uk, and http://www.saiweb.co.uk as an alias, however, saiweb.co.uk redirects to http://www.saiweb.co.uk... So why not have ServerName http://www.saiweb.co.uk and saiweb.co.uk as the alias?
No-WWW doesn’t only give validation to sites that reject http://www.yourdomain.com, they also give validation to sites that do not redirect either way, or that redirect from www. to the no-www equivalent.
Personally, I prefer websites which require login to redirect to a no-www domain, or at least share cookies between the two domains… Nothing is worse than trying to login, and being logged in on http://www.example.com but not http://example.com.