Thread

Merged with previous discussion.

Easier on my eyes… :coolhmm:

I don’t use www because it takes longer to type.

About 50% related this but I work in radio advertising making adverts for all over the country and the world.

Nowadays we don’t normally bother with the www bit as most people will either type it in anyway or the browser will generally append it at some point anyway.

Having said that though I always always check if the URL works if it is a .co.uk domain as lots of them don’t work without the www part attached to them or go to a completely different page or something equally silly.

Something that their hosts could easily fix but don’t seem to bother doing most of the time. Most people don’t realize just quite how much time is taken up in an advert saying www they seem to think it’s just three letters but it’s really three whole words.

A lot of clients have been saved a lot of embarrassment by my pointing out that their web-page doesn’t work if you don’t type in the www though!

Best wishes,

Mark

I have moved away from the www in Hambo Development but I didn’t for Hambo Design. It is a bit late now as I will affect my SEO rankings.

Now for radio or TV (spoken) I feel that www is important as it serves as a trigger for the brain to remember the address. If I just said hambodevelopment.com then you might pick up .com but not the first bit.

I just redirect to the non www version.

I always find it quite annoying when sites don’t use www. Whenever I go to a site by typing the url, I always use for instance expressionengine and then hit ctrl+enter. All my browsers automagically turn that into http://www.expressionengine.com. So therefor I vote for www!

I applied the mod_rewrite rule linked here, but on my server for some reason it only works in the root directory. I tried adapting the rule to a subdirectory but it ends up sending back to the root directory instead of simply stripping out “www.”

Any suggestions?

Can you post your .htaccess, McGehee?  It’s probably something simple.  One little character with mod_rewrite can ruin the whole pot of beans!

Here is mine for reference (just to remove www) -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Can you post your .htaccess, McGehee?  It’s probably something simple.  One little character with mod_rewrite can ruin the whole pot of beans!

This is a direct adaptation from the link you posted, for my root directory:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mcgeheezone\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) <a href="http://mcgeheezone.com/$1">http://mcgeheezone.com/$1</a> [R=Permanent]

I tried adapting this to my /ee/ subdirectory by making it look like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mcgeheezone\.com/ee$
RewriteRule (.*) <a href="http://mcgeheezone.com/ee$1">http://mcgeheezone.com/ee$1</a> [R=Permanent]

I stand—well, sit—ready to bang my head on my desk when you give me the mind-bogglingly simple fix I’m sure I’m missing.

I think you only need to remove the URL and use what I have in mine. Back yours up then try my version and see if it works.

I think you only need to remove the URL and use what I have in mine. Back yours up then try my version and see if it works.

That has the same effect as what I originally included. It works in the root but not in any sub, and if I put it in a sub it sends the request to the root. If I can’t make the server do it in all subdirectories, I need to know how to tell the server to serve the request from the current directory rather than going back to the root.

Is this the full .htaccess?  If there are other rules, they could also have an impact.

Is this the full .htaccess?  If there are other rules, they could also have an impact.

In the root directory, that (since replaced with Steven’s rule) is the first immediately after “RewriteEngine on”. I wouldn’t expect subsequent rules to have an impact on the application of this one. All subsequent rules are specific to particular files or EE entries, and all already have the “www.” removed.

When I tried adapting it into the /ee/ subdirectory, I also placed it immediately after “RewriteEngine on”.

Can you give us your full .htaccess file here?