[Sigia-l] Subdomain usability

[Kenneth Bryson]

I was more referring to the subdomain question whereby the "yelling to
your spouse from the kitchen 'just go to finance.google.com'" test
resuls in them typing www.finance.google.com becuase they think the www
part is implicit.  In this case (just to give yahoo a break for a
minute) resulting in a 404 error and the inevitable trip out of the
kitchen to help out the spouse.

To take a step back, however, it seems that webmasters should make a
reasonable effort to make sure their site resolves with any reasonable
combination of URLs,  The question is, just what is reasonable?

finance.google.com - works
www.finance.google.com - 404
www.google.com/finance  - works
google.com/finance - works

Seems about right, without getting into the question of whether
companies should register common mis-spellings of their name to help out
the poor typers out there (www.goolge.com anyone?)

-kb



>>> Andrew <andrew at humaneia.com> 6/8/2006 5:22 PM >>>
Kenneth Bryson wrote:
> I've found the verbal test rather unreliable.  In dealing with both
my
> spouse and coworkers, if I tell them to go to a URL that starts with
a
> sub-domain, they'll invariably type a www in front of it despite the
> fact I didn't include that in my verbal instructions.
>
> In these cases, some people just assume that every site starts with
a
> www and assume that I'm assuming as much in my verbal instructions. 
And
> don't even get me started on telling someone how to type in a URL for
an
> SSL enabled site!
>
> -kb
>   

Hi Kenneth,

I think people do this because of the evil stupidity of sites that 
insist on it. There are, sadly, enough of them around that 
404/equivalent out on just the domain name
that people are wary. 10 years after AOL and friends brought access to

the great unwashed, billions of pages later, and there are still sites

that do not work without the 'www.'. I think that if we guillotined a 
few of the main miscreants publicly, the rest might work it out. Or
not.

Best regards, Andrew
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