WWW is so five years ago
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www. was the most heard slogan in radio commercials late nineties.
The first browser was called WorldWideWeb (hence www) and when the internet really took of some people decided to put www. for every web address (because the host of a web-server was often www., for ftp it was ftp.)
But what is the function of www. ? Well actually, it has no function (anymore). it is nothing more than a subdomain pointing to the homepage (read: useless subdomain) It was used to point out that the address was an internet address. www. meant Go to the worldwideweb and then type in the address . top level domain (.com, .net, .org, .nl, .us, .to, etc.). People got used to it. But that doesn’t mean that people do not understand what we are talking about without the www. In contrary, people get annoyed nowadays if you mention the www. part and I totally agree!
It is so 5 years ago!
Still, internet companies use www., but (with capital B) still some sites do not work without it!!!! (even some who claim to be web2.0 compatible) To give you some examples, I’ve dropped some sites that do not work without www.
And please guys, wake up: more than 15% of all people never use www. anymore to visit a site! That means that you’re loosing traffic, and may be even more important, you’re not being taken seriously ! I’m not gonna spend a diam to a company that cannot even get this issue right!
Here are just a couple remarkable examples:
To start off with some good old classics:
Orange.com !!! yes the telco!
VI.nl The biggest soccer site in the Netherlands with million and millions of pageviews!
Prime Technology Ventures (They claim to invest in innovative web startups, but cannot be reached without www. !)
In the web2.0 sphere here in the Netherlands there are also some companies who just didn’t get it:
YelloYello.com (The Dutch web2.0 version of the Yellowpages)
Boober.nl (Dutch clone of Zopa.com)
It really irritates me and I hope it irritates you too :)
