Poll: does people prefer to type www or not?

do you prefer domain.com or www.domain.com?

[silverbytes]

I personally find bothering to type www before domain
domains without www are shorter...

But what does most of people do?
I know that you can press ctrl enter to autofill www and com

But the question? Are domains without www prefered?
since it's recommended to have links to your site in the same way (not ones with www and others without www) what is it best?

[transactiongeek]

Not sure I understand. Are you asking from a search engine optimisation point of view?

As far as I know, www is an anachronism from when people would primarily enter in domains for things other than URLs.

Today, I really can not imagine anyone prefers to enter it - if they do, it is probably either habit, a lack of understanding, or a very poorly configured DNS/Webserver.

[silverbytes]

Lets say I plan to launch a site.
Should I promote it like mysite.com or www.mysite.com,
the linking campaing need to know that...

But how do most of people prefer to access or see your site? as mysite.com or www.mysite.com?

I personally like mysite.com because is shorter but don't want to take that decision based on my taste

[ImVickieB]

I think that recently google has made www.mysite.com = mysite.com

I do know, where Page Rank is concerned, google used to show two different PR's when you used www.mysite.com vs mysite.com, but now, the PR rating is exactly the same. I know that the links haven't changed so it has to be a new way google deals with things.

[HitProf]

I tend to type without www and am annoyed if a site doesn't properly show up.

[eWhisper]

I prefer to not write www before the domain name - just shorter.

However, most people I know who are not overly famaliar with the web workings, always type in www first.

[pmkpmk]

Stats from our domain:

99% with "www"
1% without "www"

However, we did niever advertise the non-www-address.

[choster]

Trouble is, some sites require the www hostname, among them a large proportion of sites I use heavily: a large proportion of US cabinet departments and agencies including military, major universities in the US and UK. That does not seem to be the case with policy research institutions, party organizations, or commercial sites-- I suppose the first group doesn't have as strong an incentive as the second to make themselves as easy to use as possible.

But it also means that to be safe, I always type the www unless advertised otherwise or known to work. And even in cases where they work, for instance most newspapers, they often redirect to www or seem to take longer to "orient" themselves. The quarter of a second required to type in four extra characters is worth avoiding a second of redirection.

Besides, for marketing purposes, "www" makes a name unambiguously and obviously a website. While mta.info works, would you ever think to type it in a browser? It looks like a tagline or name of some kind of initiative, not like a url. MTA wisely used www.mta.info on the posters advertising its new preferred address.

[zendak]

Here's a quote from no-www.org

By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the 'http://' onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to [e-mail]. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.
Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.

I think that makes sense. Personally I find it less cumbersome to omit the www, and more..elegant in a way, too. But as has been mentioned by others in this thread it is probably still confusing to the non-tech-savvy broad public for a number of reasons, habit and lack of technical knowledge mainly. I hope to see a gradual change in awareness though in the not-too-distant future.

[sem4u]

For a .com I usually use Ctrl-Enter in IE6.

[choster]

no-www.org

Another web crusade against another extremely minor problem. Four extra bytes! Oh, the bandwidth! Well, it wouldn't be any fun otherwise, right? :-)

all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol... the software prepends the 'http://' onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80

Not quite the best analogy. Extending this argument would say that the browser should add www if not provided, assuming the user is looking for the root home page of a canonical domain.

Mail servers do not require you to send emails to [e-mail]

Not true as a blanket statement. Ideally, yes, any modern network has a centralized mail distribution system. But even Stanford University-- home of the original Yahoo-- did not have unified e-mail routing until recently.

[rogerd]

Google has not made the non-www and www domains completely synonymous. For reasons I don't fully understand, one site I work with has separate, different listings for both options. There's no actual overlap of content.

[zendak]

no-www.org
Another web crusade against another extremely minor problem. Four extra bytes! Oh, the bandwidth! Well, it wouldn't be any fun otherwise, right? :-)

I agree, I'm not the biggest fan of crusades and other forms of evangelism on the web either, as these usually cover subjects only relevant to a small percentage of technically-minded web users. Just thought it would be interesting to direct attention to this somewhat extreme approach to the matter.

[pmkpmk]

We have one special-purpose server, which goes by the name update.widgets.com This server is normally accessed from within a special piece of software, but it can also be access menually by visitors. The full URL including the "http" is printed on our service manuals.

Still, most of the people try www.update.widgets.com first - get an error message, and then look closer and type the real address.

After several weeks, we added the www.update.widgets.com address to the configuration...