Kilian Valkhof

Websites that don’t work without www

websitesthatdontworkwithoutwww.com is no longer online

One of my biggest internet-petpeeves is websites that force you to put www. in front of them. It’s 2009, so we should be able to get by with just the domain name, right? Wrong. There are still quite some websites that simply don’t work without www.

So I decided some action needed to be taken. I got the domainname websitesthatdontworkwithoutwww.com, installed Chyrp, got a Thumbalizr API key and started making a list. Name ’em and shame ’em!. If any of the websites fix their non-www version, the without thumbnail will automatically update and I’ll add a link to their site :)

Input time

The site is there, and it has a couple of websites on it, but now I need your input to start adding more and more! If you encounter sites that don’t work without www., please send them to submit@websitesthatdontworkwithoutwww.com. You can also @reply the twitter account: @wtdwww. (and better yet, follow it!)

The Firefox thing

During development I got a couple of remarks that “well, site X just works you know”, to which I could wittily (*ahem*) reply “Nope, it doesn’t. I bet you use Firefox 3.5!”. That’s because Firefox 3.5 automatically adds www. in front of domain names if they don’t work without. While this is awesome for end users, it just hides the fact that a lot of hosting providers/webmasters are incompetent at doing their jobs. In that regard it’s a shame.

Since I don’t want to just point and laught, fun as that is, I’ve also added a help page, where some explanation of how to fix the non-www website will be placed. I’m still working on that, if you want you can help (just shoot me an e-mail!)

This was a fun little project I made in a couple of evenings. I still have to soften up some of the edges and tweak parts of the “site”, but overall I’m pretty happy with how easy it was to set up.