How Well Do You Follow Directions?.

Type the following URL into your web browser. I'm going to spell it out so you can't copy and paste.

Go to Aye Ess Oh Ess Oh Eff Tee Dot Eff Oh Are See Ee Nine Dot See Oh Dot You Kay. (It helps if you say it out loud.)

If you end up here:

Then you are an expert direction follower and follow directions better than 90% of our clients/prospects.

If you end up here:

(at our old web site) then you do not follow directions well.

What's the difference? In the former, you followed the directions exactly and entered the URL exactly as I gave it to you, which is what I wanted you to do. In the latter, you did not follow the directions exactly, but instead added the unnecessary and deprecated (and in this case incorrect) "www" to the beginning of the URL. I did not want you to start the URL with "www". If I had, I would have said so. Many of our prospects incorrectly assume a "www" when I tell them the URL for our web meeting service. This usually results in a minute or two of confusion as they try and figure out why they can't see the web meeting I've started for them.

I would like to point out that for the vast majority of URLs, prefixing them with "www" is unnecessary. www.google.com is the same as google.com; www.amazon.com is the same as amazon.com; www.fu-news.blogspot.com is the same as fu-news.blogspot.com. In the former cases of each, you just wasted four keystrokes, and (if you were speaking it to someone else) a lot of breath. For most web sites, you do not need the "www", and when you do it is usually to specify that you want the www server and not some other specific content server (such as mail.domain.com or ftp.domain.com). So when conveying a URL to you, I will tell you to begin it with "www" if and only if it is necessary. If I have left it out, then it is either unnecessary or incorrect. So never assume that a URL begins "www".

See no-www.org for more details.