Watching TV, reading newspapers, listening to the radio and just general reading online always seems to amaze me how entities display their domain names. Most domain names I see in newspapers hear on the radio and see on TV always seem to include www. with their web address. Why? Do they think their customers don’t know what the net is yet? Maybe they do not know that if you leave off www. and just type the domain (if the CNAME record is correct) that their customers will still land on there website?
In advertising, SPACE/Time is always valuable. So I hope one of these days people will figure it out! In print, adding www. add four extra characters and it just looks ugly! Then you hear a voice stumble off W W W Dot bla bla bla bla Dot com!
Another thing that I always see in print ads is one long line of gumble…. Help people out and make those keywords POP! You tell me, what looks better? I say # 3 by far…
1.) www.domainname.com 2.) WWW.DOMAINNAME.COM 3.) DomainName.com
I get a little free newspaper in the mail called The Green Bay Sun. So I looked through the paper just to see how domain names were displayed. For one, there are a great deal of domains in the paper. Any good domains? Not Really! So this is how they are displayed…
Starting off in the header is the newspapers domain.. WWW.GREENBAYSUN.COM stuck in all caps! Now the paper is called The Green Bay Sun. I like that they have the shorter version, but they also need to cover their butt and have TheGreenBaySun.com as well… Do they? NO. The domain is available. HELLO!!
The next two domains in the paper make me sick to my stomach. Long and Ugly! www.packerlandhi.com & www.renewalbyanderson.com . All in lower case, include www. and no Poping Keywords..
Then there are two ads that contain No Domains. Then two more with lower case runs of www.schneiderjobs.com & www.budgetblinds.com . The Budget Blinds domain is so small, I could hardly read it. If they would of left off www., they would of had more room and could of made it bigger.
The next page included 4 ads, all with No Domains.. A full page ad with www.gandrud.com . A 3/4 page ad for a furniture store and No Domain in the ad. The next page made me happy, well kind of.. 6 ads total. 3 of the 6 do not display a domain. One makes the domain a running name with www.gocwt.com but the others kind of Get It. www.StJohnsWholeLife.org (poping keywords) www.ErieMetalRoofs.com .
I could keep going, but 95% use running domains that are hard to read. About half do not include a domain at all. The best "generic" domain was BudgetBlinds.com but it was hard to read. 99% were .com’s, a couple .org’s and one .edu.
Larry M
I feel your pain!!!
I agree leaving the www off looks so much bigger budget. http://www.eriemetalroofs.com is like your grandma learning how to spell out domain names.
Although when the new “super extensions” come out (http://pepsi) we might just wish the old doubleya’s back in…
nice post
namer.ca
You are right #3 looks the best Visually as it saves on space.
However for search engines results for some reason having www. in url makes it look better, maybe it is just because of familiarity.
Is that why your dotweekly.com resolves to www. ???
**Jamie Says**
DotWeekly.com resolves back to http://www.dotweekly.com as that is a standard CNAME record. I do not think having www. effects SEO. Also, when adding an SSL Cert, the cert would go only onto the www. version of the domain. For whatever reason, I have seen many company domains that domains without www. do not resolve to the www. version and that is missed traffic for those who do not add www.
Art
Well, i dont fully agree with that. In certain target population, i think good amount of people might still be not sure if the site is the site, unless it has www in front of it. Infact i have seen it before, where people confused my business name or didnt know what the site was, without www. in front of the name. I certainly agree with ALL CAPITAL or all minor case, but www doesn’t really hurt, and doesnt take too much space. http is a waste, but www is also seen as universal on line sign. So i wouldnt discount www’s in some cases.
**Jamie Says**
Hello Art. I can see how some people wouldn’t fully understand a domain name without the www. in front of the name. I think over time, most people and specific markets (younger people) understand a domain without www. . When you hear people “talk” about certain sites, they never say www. site name .com etc. It’s just YouTube.com or Google.com …. Hmmmm