Already Worldwide: Eliminating the “www.”
I’ve long felt that the “www.” in web addresses is unneccessary and redundant. Originally, it specified that an address was on a webserver (i.e. not an email or ftp server) … but we already use “http://” to do essentially the same thing. Why not drop those four extra characters that keep cluttering up our addresses? Simplicity is king, and users deserve usability!
Luckily, it’s easy to politely and silently redirect users to the bare domain name (like mine does … http://www.webel.net automatically takes you to http://webel.net). Here’s how, thanks to No-www:
All you need to do is create or modify a file called .htaccess located in the root directory of your site and add the following [three] lines, changing the red text to match your domain.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
If you happen to link to webeldotnet, please take a moment and make sure that there’s no “www.” on your link. That little change would really help me to clean a lot of clutter up with search engines and directories. Thanks!
