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Tip: Don’t make me type www

This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for years. There remains a rampant problem in NZ: sites that lead to a Address Not Found error if you neglect to type www before the web address, for example…

These sites cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build, maintain and promote. Adding a redirect to the www address is a basic, ten second job for any web geek (see: wildcard DNS redirect).

Please try your site now. If somebody can’t access your site by simply typing your domain and the suffix (ie .com) then go fix it now!! Getting an error is a bad experience. You’re losing business and you’re frustrating people who happen to be persistent and knowledgeable enough to re-try with www in front.

Care to out any other offenders?

12 Responses to “Tip: Don’t make me type www”

acc.co.nz

Posted by Roger on 18 November 2008

We use Australian Air Express for our deliveries.

aae.com.au is a culprit

Posted by Zavier on 18 November 2008

I emailed graysonline.co.nz about this in 2006, it took them a couple of years to fix it, it used to go to graysonline.com.au which is arguably even worse than address not found.
cricinfo.org is another good one, that is the url for editors of the site, http://www.cricinfo.org get’s you to cricket scores ( you could argue it’s a redirect to www,cricinfo.com, but it start start out as .org :) ).

Posted by Nigel on 18 November 2008

hurunui.govt.nz

Posted by Ben Kepes on 18 November 2008

wdc.govt.nz
waimakariri.govt.nz

notice a theme here?

Posted by Ben Kepes on 18 November 2008

And how much money have these companies spent on their websites.

Better go check mine….

Posted by Warren on 18 November 2008

msd.govt.nz

@ben: I’ll see your theme and raise you the largest govt. department :p

Posted by Nik Wakelin on 18 November 2008

dcc.co.nz
dunedin.govt.nz

I approached them about it (irritates me that much) and got this back:
“We are aware of the issues and our configuration reflects what we want.”

Posted by Jack Pivac on 18 November 2008

Ahmen brother.

Posted by Adam on 18 November 2008

I definitely agree, it’s a sure sign the site isn’t management by someone with a techie mind.

My second biggest complaint universally is dodgy/useless 404 pages, I ended up writing about it on my blog - http://www.dpixelblog.com/2008/08/crafting-the-perfect-404-page/ - but some of the biggest sites on the web (like youtube) have the most useless 404 pages.

Posted by Sam Law on 19 November 2008

at least ird.govt.nz is smart enough to add the www for you

Posted by Roger on 19 November 2008

The one that bugs me is ravensdown.co.nz. Not only do they insist you use the www, they also want you to use IE. Have a look at it in Firefox…bad CSS alignment.

Why really interests me is why big companies like this don’t fix it as I pointed it out three years ago.

Posted by Will Croxford on 20 November 2008

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