To ruin our search rankings... ;)

Actually, we were 'changing' our name/URL from 'E-consultancy' to 'Econsultancy' so were effectively changing the domain, URLs, logos etc. anyway so thought we would also drop the 'www' while we were at it.

Only two reasons for this really: firstly, to make our URLs shorter, secondly it seemed like this might be the way websites were going. Though not entirely convinced the latter point is necessarily the case. 

Actually, the whole 'http://', 'www' and so on gubbins will become increasingly meaningless I think. Users don't care what protocol is being used, nor do they want to have to care about sub-domains, country extensions and so on. Already browsers are pretty good at dealing with people leaving out all this extra stuff. Indeed Chrome, via its search-in-the-URL-bar feature, means you can pretty much just bung in the company name. Mobile phones too are getting better as this sort of thing - you don't need to know URLs, you just use 'apps'. 

I might ask Mike Grehan to chip in with his "Http/html/SEO is dead" if you really want to broaden this debate...!

Ashley

thanks for the info ashley. i'm sure you're right - that users don't care about it. but my personal opinion is that users have become so used to it that they automatically use it when typing a web address.

i think dropping it can cause minor problems though. for instance, i rely on firefox to complete addresses for me and, recently, i couldn't remember the name of a site i use. i just remembered that it started with the word 'trust'. so i typed in 'www.trust' to see what firefox suggested. however, it didn't suggest the site i wanted because they have also dropped the 'www'. the site was trustedplaces.com.

this is a very minor problem but, if there are no really compelling reasons to drop it, i think i'm going to just stick with the status quo. as they say, 'if it ain't broke ...'.