Q. Kim, I'm confused about Web addresses. Some sites have a "www,"
and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they need the "www" to work and
sometimes they don't. What gives?
A. I don't blame you for being confused, Rick. For those who don't get what Rick is asking, here's an example.
My main website is www.komando.com, but you can also get there by typing komando.com. It works either way.
However, I also use news.komando.com and videos.komando.com. My contests http://www.komando.com/contests/ have similar addresses, such as win.komando.com. But if you add a "www" to the beginning of those, like www.news.komando.com, it doesn't work.
As confusing as it might sound, there is a reason for this.
First, you should know a few terms. The main part of a Web address, such as the "komando" in " www.komando.com," is commonly called a domain.
The prefix, such as "www," "news" or "videos," is a subdomain. (For those who know, I'm going to ignore top-level domains right now to keep the explanation shorter.)
Think of the domain like a hotel and the subdomains like rooms. Each room can have different decorations.
With that in mind, let's take a quick step back through time.
In the early days of the Internet, things were very different. There was no World Wide Web as we know it. There were no cat pictures or videos. Everything was plain text.
There were also other ways people regularly communicated. Some people set up parts of their sites for file transfers, email and news groups.
To keep these organized, they used subdomains, or, in our analogy, hotel rooms. So, what we now call a website would often live in the World Wide Web, or "www", subdomain.
A place for uploading and downloading files would live in the File Transfer Protocol or "ftp" subdomain. News groups usually used "news" or "nntp."
Basically it went from a hotel room to the hotel lobby. That's why starting around 2003, browsers began to add it for you automatically if you forgot.
These days, most sites just redirected their domain to the "www" subdomain. That's why when you visit "komando.com" it redirects to " www.komando.com".
But not every site does, which is why you can occasionally run into problems. For a while, search sites still treated "www" and non-"www" addresses as different sites, even if the content was the same.
Today, advances in search sites have made this a non-issue. Search sites are now smart enough to know that both addresses have the same content.
This also explains why typing in http://www.news.komando.com doesn't work. "News" is a subdomain of the "komando.com" site. You're asking for a subdomain - "www" - of a subdomain - "news". Going back to our hotel analogy, it's like looking in the closet expecting to find the bed.
As a rule, it usually doesn't matter if a site address uses "www" or not. It's just a leftover from the early days of the Internet.
However, you may run into a few sites where the "www" is necessary. It's pretty rare, but some sites require it. If you have trouble loading a site, try putting the "www" back in.
Occasionally, this will fix the issue and route you to the correct site.
However, if the site address is already a subdomain, like "videos.komando.com," then no "www" is needed.
