It's something everyone has done before, even us developers will have inevitably done it before - mistype the number of W's.
Although not always required, as most domains will be setup to support or redirect with no prefix, when you do decide to type the "www" part sometimes you'll get it wrong.
For me, I hardly type the www when putting in a web address and as I've been using computers long enough when I do have to put it in I usually get it right. But this afternoon when I thought I'd have a quick jump on Facebook (don't judge) I accidentally put in "wwww.facebook.com".
To my surprise however I was redirected to www.facebook.com.
At first I thought it was something that was happening with Chrome but upon checking another site I wasn't redirected.
My next thought was that this is a bloody good idea! In fact, why not redirect "w" and "ww" as well as I bet they're both common mistakes!
Of course, turns out Facebook already do this (as do a few other sites e.g. w.google.com) but there are plenty that don't.
Obviously there's a balance of "is this and is it actually worth the effort - how many people type wwwwwwwwwwww?" but it makes sense to me.
A bit of digging reveals that Facebook redirect w, ww and wwww where as Google only redirect w and ww. Yahoo don't redirect w but do redirect ww and wwww.
For me I think on all my websites I'm going to redirect w, ww and wwww.
What are your thoughts? Worth the effort to help the simple minded few?
Although not always required, as most domains will be setup to support or redirect with no prefix, when you do decide to type the "www" part sometimes you'll get it wrong.
For me, I hardly type the www when putting in a web address and as I've been using computers long enough when I do have to put it in I usually get it right. But this afternoon when I thought I'd have a quick jump on Facebook (don't judge) I accidentally put in "wwww.facebook.com".
To my surprise however I was redirected to www.facebook.com.
At first I thought it was something that was happening with Chrome but upon checking another site I wasn't redirected.
My next thought was that this is a bloody good idea! In fact, why not redirect "w" and "ww" as well as I bet they're both common mistakes!
Of course, turns out Facebook already do this (as do a few other sites e.g. w.google.com) but there are plenty that don't.
Obviously there's a balance of "is this and is it actually worth the effort - how many people type wwwwwwwwwwww?" but it makes sense to me.
A bit of digging reveals that Facebook redirect w, ww and wwww where as Google only redirect w and ww. Yahoo don't redirect w but do redirect ww and wwww.
For me I think on all my websites I'm going to redirect w, ww and wwww.
What are your thoughts? Worth the effort to help the simple minded few?