I am interested to know what people think is the trend with regards using www in their web addresses these days? Am increasingly seeing domain.com/feature rather than www.domain.com/feature and wonder if others think this is likely to become the new best practice?

hi, Claire, how are you?

Boring History Bit:

The habit of using www. probably caught on in the web's early day's when it helped to identify web address and when redirects were less widely employed and so these details mattered.

It was actually from the days where a subdomain would denote an actual individual machine. The mail server would be mail.domain.com, the web server would be www.domain.com .

Are People Really That Savvy?

I do a lot of work for an American dotcom company. For countries outside the US, they use the domains 'uk.domain.com', 'fr.domain.com', etc.

I work with several members of their web & e-business teams, and each & every one of them will type in the URL as 'www.uk.domain.com', even though all this does is redirect to uk.domain.com .

ie: these people have worked with the web for many years & are still under the impression that they have to type 'www' to get to their own website.

The Actual Answer To Your Question

A wishy-washy answer, but: I think it depends on your primary audience, brand recognition & context.

eg, if your website is clairelowe.co.uk & you're aiming at a non-tech-savvy audience, I'd always go for www.clairelowe.co.uk . If you're talking about johnlewis.com in a radio ad, I think "visit johnlewis.com" is going to be fine.

If it was my company, I'd either

1. Stick with www - it's safest & there can be zero confusion
2. OR: test it & see what happens

Summary

Unless there's a good reason to ditch it, or you have the opportunity to A/B test it, just keep the www & forget about it.

I hope that helps!

daniel

Thanks both - appreciate your advice.