Something I’ve been noticing the past few months is an increasing number of web sites that do not use www. Either this is a trend that’s full force and I’ve missed it (busy with SEO clients) or it’s a trend picking up steam. Or maybe it’s a techie geek sort of thing as most of the sites I’ve noticed are a bit geeky. And they would take that designation as a compliment I think.
First I noticed Glen Stansberry’s excellent blog was shortened to just lifedev.net. Then Thomas aka TwisterMC’s new blog, bloggerdesign.com did the same thing. And just today I noticed Greg Hartnett (greghartnett.com) of BOTW has just said no to the www. It’s not just these sites though, I’ve noticed many others too.
Maybe it’s just a sort of geekish homeage to Slashdot, which I don’t think has ever used a www.
I guess there really isn’t a practical reason for using www. In fact there never has. You certainly don’t need it to surf the world wide web. Speaking of which, here’s a copy of the very first web page.
What’s also interesting is that Google Webmaster Central now has a new preferred domain tool that lets you designate a www or non-www preference for your domain. The tool was meant to help webmasters avoid the www and non-www urls being recognized as duplicate web sites. But I suppose it would also make it easier to lose the www.
So if you want to shorten your url and make it stand out from the crowd, then maybe you can lose the www. And be cool in a geeky sort of way.
