Isn’t it time everyone drop the www? Or at least stop requiring it for your site to work. All of my sites work if you type in http://www.domain.com or simply domain.com. In fact, if you type in the www, I have the .htaccess files set to send a redirect. Try it out…you won’t get to any of my pages and still have the www showing in the address bar.
I never type out www. because that’s 4 extra characters I shouldn’t have to type out. In my opinion it’s a useless sub domain. Yes, www, is really just a sub domain when you look at it. When we get email addresses most of the time they aren’t username@email.domain.com, so why with a web site do we need a sub domain of www announcing that we’re on the “World Wide Web”? I think it’s pretty obvious we’re on the web.
I can’t stand it when I type in a domain.com and get some stupid error message from a site. Usually I head over to Google and search for the company or site name and find out that they require www. for their site to come up in my browser. Not only is it a waste of time and energy for me as a visitor, but these sites are losing out on visitors and potential customers because not everyone will go the extra mile to find the real URL that works.
If both http://www.domain.com and domain.com work your domain and you’d like to redirect the www. URLs entirely, add the following to your .htaccess file. Actually this code will redirect all sub domains (not just www), so you’ll have to modify it slightly if you have sub domains you use.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Just make sure to replace domain.com with your actual domain name. As far as getting domain.com to work if it doesn’t…well that’s something a little too host specific for me to address. Contact your web hosting company for details.
*This rant has been brought to you by the fine folks at rollerblade.com which gives a big ugly error page of “Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)” and where www.rollerblade.com works just fine. Please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks this is stupid!
