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Lazy webmasters cost their employers millions of visitors
December 29th, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
Sanctimonious webmasters, or sheer laziness? I’ve often wondered in sheer amazement at the audacity of the treatment doled out to website visitors. Not (I am hoping) by the company, but by the one or two webmasters who are in charge of the web servers.
For example, if you are a visitor to the FBI website, and you type in http://fbi.gov you would think that the site has been taken down by terrorists. In fact, someone too lazy or self-righteous is insisting that you must type in the www. or they won’t let you in. Yes, http://www.fbi.gov works, while http://fbi.gov earns money for Microsoft in the form of advertising on the Page Not Found error pages. Is the FBI, the only government agency in the dark here? Nope: Hud.gov, ATF.gov, FCC.gov all have the odd 90’s insistence that you put the www. in there. Thankfully, the webmasters over at the CIA, SSA, NSA, FTC and the IRS know what they are doing.
In a bricks and mortar example, this is the equivalent of spending thousands of dollars on advertising to drive people to your store. But you have two entrances - front and side. You could very easily have left the side doors open, but instead, your janitor has boarded it up and allows homeless people dressed as Bill Gates to hang out there handing out flyers for your competitors.
Some server administrators may read this and say that it is not a priority since most people know that you should just add www to a domain name. Maybe in the 90’s you twit.
There are not as many examples of this as there used to be in the business world. So, perhaps we can blame this on Government Bureaucracy? However, there is a very real, and even stranger problem occuring in the business world…
Let’s take the bricks and mortar analogy a step further. Let’s imagine that many of your customers arrive at your store and attempt to open a door to your neighboring building. There’s a doorway there, and every day, thousands of your customers are knocking on that door. Good news - luckily for you, the building was acquired by the CEO in a poker game. Bad news - that damn janitor again has locked the door, boarded it up and is letting a vagrant camp out there yelling “Search MSN - this place is closed!”.
I kid you not. And the bigger the company, the more idiotic the mess. FaceBook has a $15 Billion valuation, they own FaceBooks.com but they have allowed their janitor to keep it closed. An estimated 5,000 people a day visit FaceBooks.com, obviously looking for FaceBook.com’s front door. Doing the math, if it takes 10 seconds for each visitor to hopefully realize their error and persevere on to FaceBook.com, that is 5,000 x 10 seconds x 365 days = 5,069 man hours a year of wasted time.
So, thank you FaceBook. You are pissing away 5000 man hours of your visitors time trying to make it harder for them to get to your front door. Why? I just don’t get it. If you are going to go to the trouble of setting up FaceBook.com to redirect to www.FaceBook.com, why not take an extra 2 minutes and set up FaceBooks.com to do the same?
2 minutes of your employee’s time, to save 5,000 hours per year. That’s a good ROI, good PR and just general common courtesy. In the words of Will Ferrel - ‘Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!’
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Posted in Direct Navigation, Domains for Dummies |
December 29th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Two comments:
1) http://fbi.gov works fine in Firefox and in Opera. It’s only good old Microsoft who isn’t with the program.
2) The article would have been considerably more helpful if you had presented a solution instead of simply ranting at lazy webmasters. Until I read this, I had no idea that IE behaved this way.
Carol Logan Newbill
http://www.2fishweb.com
UPDATE BY JAY: I use Firefox and it doesn’t work for me. The solution is to fix it at the DNS level and on the web server and it would work globally for everyone. Literally it would take minutes to do. Special people with special software is not the solution. Fixing the real problem is what I am getting at.
December 29th, 2007 at 8:10 am
For blogger, I have discovered (quite by accident) that when you convert the blogspot domain to your own domain, it’s possible to split your traffic into two: the www going to your blogger site, the http://domain (etc.) going to a parking site (I simply forgot to forward the domain to myself).
Of course, that’s not what I wanted, so I quickly remedied the situation.
It IS crazy that the government would do such a nutty thing, though.
Ms Domainer
December 29th, 2007 at 8:13 am
>In fact, someone too lazy or self-righteous is insisting that you must type in the http://www. or they won’t let you in.
Yup. Pretty stupid. I’ve also heard that it is wise to set up your server with “ww.” and “wwww.” because the “www.” is often mistyped too. Not many webmasters do this but internet leaders like Google, Yahoo and Amazon sure do.
December 29th, 2007 at 8:15 am
This is happening for years, and will continue to do so, unless the companies or institutions hire someone savvy enough.
Nuno Oliveira
CatalogDomains.com
December 29th, 2007 at 8:43 am
You should not only make sure your site works without www, but you should also make sure your site works with only one, two or four w since people (like me) sometimes hit the w-button too much or little.
/Andreas
XavierMedia.com
December 29th, 2007 at 8:53 am
Nuno - “savy enough”? Only having sites respond to http://www. is a hold-over from the transistor radio days. Anyone putting up a site today has no excuse whatsoever. My 4 year old asks to go to “Lego dot com”, not to “double-you, double-you, double-you dot Lego dot com”.
And FaceBooks.com - that’s just stupidity in motion. Why own an asset and not make use of it?
December 29th, 2007 at 11:40 am
I would also add to the list “ww.” as typing all those w’s can get tedious!
As a Web administrator who manages both the applications and the servers, I make these appropriate settings.
The issue with alternate domain names is an off one - many people outside of technology don’t want other domain names pointing to a Web site, as they think it will dilute the main domain name. I am not lying, I have had this told to me!
mp/m
December 29th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I just looked up facebooks.com and according to Compete they get about 6800 US visitors per month!!!! (see http://whois.domaintools.com/facebooks.com) Why on earth would you want to loose that traffic?
Also some people may not realize they miss-spelled facebook.com and think the site is constantly down, hacked or something
/Andreas
December 29th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
I’ve understood the “www and no www” for a long time but I never thought about “w, ww, and wwww”. And I’ve messed up that “www” myself so many times I really should be kicked for not doing that before. Thanks everybody.
I learn something every day here. Last night I learned a new phrase and today I’ve learned some new web server aliases I should have been using.
But you know what I hate in a website? It’s typing in the domain and then getting a index page that says “click here to enter”. That is fairly prevailent in The Motorsports Industry (my niche). And a close second is Flash intro screens. Especially sites that don’t have a “Skip Intro” link or button.
December 29th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
I need the ISBN for the “Domains for Dummies” book so I can get it ordered tonight.
December 29th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Jay, FOCUS please, why this now? You have an AUCTION to promote!
December 30th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials on TV for a product called a SunSetter. The commercial displays this URL — SUNSETTER.NET — but when I type that into Internet Explorer 7 I get “Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)” instead of the website I was expecting. Of course, when I add the “www” subdomain to the URL, the site appears.
The company also owns the .com version of the domain and the site does display with or without the “www” subdomain.
But because the people at SunSetter chose to display the .net version of the domain without the “www” subdomain in the TV commercial, how much traffic — and subsequently, how many potential customers — are they losing because of this glaring error that could be fixed so easily?
Dan
December 30th, 2007 at 11:59 am
WWW is not needed with Safari 3.0, Mac OS X, Leopard. Actually with .com you don’t even need to enter anything but the domain name leading the .com, i.e. ‘domaintools’ and you will proceed to domaintools.com. A lot of needless rendering is not required with the Macintosh OS. Yet, as we all know 90% of the folks are still using MSFT XP and IE. As such webmasters are still forced to jump around to different OSs and browsers to ensure 100% compatibility. It IS tiresome.
December 30th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Now if you mention these Sunsetter.net - Sunsetter.com errors to their webmaster it will probably just get back burnered or ignored. But, maybe a friendly note to Sunsetter’s CEO might help them get this fixed or changed. The CEO won’t see the note but it will get forwarded from the Office of the CEO and might help.
But you need to word your note carefully or the person who handles the CEO’s email will get worked up and get a VP involved who will then fire the webmaster and hire a new one who will add a bunch or “gee-whiz” junk, impress his bosses and forget to fix the original errors since, “That’s the way it was when I started”. And “It’s IT’s job!”
December 30th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
jfm Says:
“WWW is not needed with Safari 3.0, Mac OS X, Leopard. Actually with .com you don’t even need to enter anything but the domain name leading the .com,……”
Yeah, but if you think of the domain as a street address and the www as the building you need to enter then it’s easier to have the whole address than just the street. Even if you know the block and the person you’re looking for.
Aliases for certain services helps those people without the benefit of a Mac or a smarter browser. And it’s the proper way to guide traffic through the maze of local servers to where they really need to be.
I don’t want somebody typing just my domain into a browser and accidently getting my mail servers default Apache page. So I alias my servers as needed in DNS and on the servers. It’s the right way to do things.
December 30th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Jay, you’re missing out alot of very related issues:
Typo-domains - you’re in that business yourself, no explanation necessary. And yes: other people currently profit off of these mistakes.
Wildcard subdomain - people type in blog.* wwww.*
Your Name/Brand with other ccTLDs - this is a real bummer.
December 30th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
ok, here’s a solution, and it helps with your domain ranking too, as the search engines only see 1 copy, not a duplicate.
YOU need to put this in your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/1 [R,L]
Thats it!!
December 30th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
> WWW is not needed with Safari 3.0, Mac OS X, Leopard.
This is a matter of your browser config. By default, IE goes to the MS search page, when it doesn’t find a server. Firefox can be configured that it adds the WWW if the server is not found. But as 90% of the people leave the default settings in their browser, you’d better get your DNS config and web server config right.
Firefox: Type “about:config” (without quotes) in the address field. Locate “keyword.enabled” and set it to “false”. Now you can just type “domaintools” in the address field (without the quotes), and you will get directly to this page. All the browsers of the early days behaved like that by default. MS changed this to make money.
December 31st, 2007 at 10:04 am
I agree, insisting upon “www” is absolutely pointless!
And even worse would be to insist that http://www.something.com is not valid either, only http://www.something.com (which I have seen at least on one site)
December 31st, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Facebook also owns facebook.net/org/info/biz etc. The reason none of them point to their website (facebook.com) is for branding reasons. It may help domainers/parkers/etc for people to be lazy and not check the URL when typing URLs in their address bar, but it does not help the real website. If someone types in facebooks.com the first time, they make very well type it in after that as well. But if they are forced to look back again and say “oh, it’s faceBOOK, not faceBOOKS”, it helps keep the brand’s naming in place. Jay, I hope you own domaintool.com.
January 1st, 2008 at 7:54 pm
That’s a good point HBaker but I’d think they’d be better off to bounce the errant visitor off the wrong domain into the right site. That way they can’t bookmark the wrong site but they wind up exactly where the website owner really wants them. And they don’t lose any visitors who might otherwise get frustrated and give up.
And they can reinforce their branding there.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
That was so right on point. I hate seeing other lazy webmasters not tightening up this glitch (unless they are my competitor).
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:33 pm
…and Verizon ISP customers get to make money for Verizon as a consequence of webmasters who require http://www…
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Hi dublindavid:
That’s a good tip for those running Apache but then again………..
I stuck a couple IPs in the htaccess (for the cgi-bin) for one of my web boards and found out “dent” isn’t the same as “deny”. Sheesh!!!
Couldn’t anybody post all day until I got home and fixed it. And of course I was busy all day. I think I’ll keep my fingers outta there from now on unless I’m wide awake and have time to watch it.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
spambait — branding? I’d like to think so, but no. It’s just laziness. If it was branding, then they’d follow Yahoo’s (misguided) strategy of sending the visitor to a page that says “you idiot, you typed in the wrong domain, our main page is at yahoo.com” Ok, so not exactly a duplicate of what the page says, but that’s my recollection of the jist of it.
But here’s a better one. How about a company that owns a domain (or two), and parks it on their Registrar’s servers, and let’s the Registrar put up a “This domain is parked” page full of ads, but (get this) the number one ad on that page is from the company that owns the domain. rotflmfao!
Ok, I’ve wiped the tears out of my eyes and I’ll show you the real live example. And I love this company. They’ve got the finest, large hotel in Vegas. (Sorry Venetian, your Tao Club is gr8, but your rooms are tired).
http://www.thewynn.com
or even
http://www.thewynnhotel.com
both have a beautiful “This page is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com” page chock-a-block full of ads from Google.
And the number one, top paying (to Google and GoDaddy) ad is from:
Wynn Las Vegas Resort
Unrivaled Luxury on the Las Vegas Strip. Stay and Golf at The Wynn.
http://www.WynnLasVegas.com
omg. You have got to be kidding me right? You’ve got someone in Wynn’s Marketing department paying Google to compete with ads on a domain they already own because the lazy webmaster hasn’t hooked up the domain to forward to their main domain. Right hand: your left hand can give you 100% of the visitors. You don’t need to pay Fedex to move them from one hand to the other.
And before we talk about pulling out a “branding” excuse, they’ve got another domain that the webmaster did set up properly: http://www.wynnhotel.com gets redirected to the official: http://www.wynnlasvegas.com
Ah well, maybe I’ll tell them about it when I check in. In the meantime, Google just made a dollar or two.
January 10th, 2008 at 5:39 am
Well, there is a difference for not having “www.” work… the fact is that all domains with mail should have the A record of their root domain point to their MX record (or a mail server that relays mail to them or that has no SMTP service at all — so at least messages can’t bounce or disappear) according to best practices.
DNS problems are more frequent with email which is also usally more DNS sensitive and once or twice a year you may be loosing an email message or two. It’s not how good or bad your DNS may be … the problem is that there is usually a bad day waiting out there for some less than optimally configured system who may want to send you mail.
My preference is pointing the root A record to the mail server which may also host a lightweight HTTP server to redirect errant HTTP traffic to the proper domain (this also keeps the logs cleaner but also obscures some of the referrers and entry pages since they are bouncing through the redirector when abreviated — much like the .htaccess mentioned above except I validate the domain is local). So people are allowed to enter minus the “www.” but they are corrected and browse and would bookmark using “www.”.
Not using “www.” is a typo despite how cool and savvy you all may feel.
But whatever… people really know next to nothing about DNS (which is different than being a webmaster or dealing with domains) so this is insignificant in proportion to other DNS aspects (cnames, SPF, etc). Those who were too lazy to type http://www. somewhere and started omitting http://www. in the first place are the culprits of many DNS and email and other woes.
Telnet to port 25 of your domain and if you connect, you may or may not be optimally configured. Domaintools.com for instance is ok as you can’t connect to it. Many small business will host their own mail server but get some cheap hosting for their website and so that is the configuration most likely to be vulnerable.
March 1st, 2009 at 10:37 am
Hello,
where i can purchase the book “domains for dummies” because i did not find it at amazon or over a google search. Maybe someone can help me to buy it.
Regards
Wolfgang
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