Beware leaving out that pesky www

Many of South Africa’s prominent websites do not work without a www subdomain added to the domain name despite the fact that using ‘www’ in a domain name is not a technical or policy requirement for websites.
The use of a www subdomain as part of a domain name (like www.mybroadband.co.za instead of just mybroadband.co.za) became a popular way to show that the Internet host provides a ‘World Wide Web’ service.
However, it was never the plan to have a www subdomain for websites. According to Paolo Palazzi, a colleague of the founder of the web, Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page.
According to Palazzi, the DNS records were never switched, and from then onwards the practice of using a pre-pending ‘www’ to a website domain gained momentum.
In recent years many websites have done away with using a www subdomain. Many websites are also using descriptive subdomains for different parts of websites (like news.google.com, mail.google.com, etc).
The requirement of placing a ‘www’ in front of a domain name to reach a website is therefore not advised, but many local websites simply do not work without www.
What is surprising is the number of high profile South African websites which do not work without the www subdomain, as shown in the list below.
- FNB e-Bucks – https://ebucks.com/
- Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) – http://jse.co.za/
- Telkom’s Do Broadband portal – http://do.co.za/
- The Department of Communications – http://doc.gov.za/
- The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa – http://icasa.org.za/
- The University of Cape Town – http://uct.ac.za/
- The University of Pretoria – http://up.ac.za/
- Samsung South Africa – http://samsung.co.za/
- Core Group – http://core.co.za
Considering the relative ease with which this problem can be solved by a tech-savvy webmaster it is surprising that many top websites are not geared towards the surfing habits many Internet users.
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