Where'd the "www." go?

If you take a look in your browser's address bar you'll see the the address begins with http://tcpc.com/ regardless of whether you entered www.tcpc.com or just tcpc.com to get to the site.  Where'd that www. prefix go?  And, why?

First Some Background Information

For purposes of this discussion, and with no attempt being made to use official, formal, terms, let's define a Domain Name like this:

[subdomain . ] | domain . | TopLevelDomain :

where:

[subdomain .] is an optional subdomain name, followed by a period separator.  The most commonly used subdomain name is www.

domain is the actual domain name, followed by a period separator.  Arguably, this is the most important part of an actual domain's name.

TopLevelDomain, or TLD, is a required global domain name.  The most common, most desired TLDs are com, org, and net.

Using this scheme, we can disect www.tcpc.com into these components:

• com is the TLD
• tcpc is the domain
• www is the subdomain

Some Considerations

When we're building a website for an organization for the first time.  One of the first things that we need to do is choose the domain name.  For organizations, like TCPC, we generally would like to have one with a TLD of org; for businesses the best TLD, if available, it's com simply because most people, potential site visitors, expect it.

There are several desirable characteristics for the domain.  We want it to be short! We want it to be easy to remember.  Being easy to remember is more important than being short.  Finally, for this discussion anyway, it shouldn't use special characters, e.g., hyphens, because they're more difficult to remember and enter.  Of course, the best possible domain name is short, easy to remember, and associate with the organization, and doesn't use special characters.

Using these rules, the most desirable name for TCPC would be tcpc.com, but that was registered by The Center for Progressive Christianity on June 5, 1996; it wasn't available for our TCPC which was registered as tcpc.com in March, 1997, so the com TLD was selected as the next best alternative.

OK Curt!  But where'd the WWW go?

Adhearing to the rule that domain names should be short, I prefer to be able to omit entering a useless www. prefix before the  domain name for any website.  However, some people incorrectly assume that any website's address must begin with www.  So, I do a little mod-rewrite magic (beyond the scope of this discussion) to automatically redirect any request for www.tcpc.com to tcpc.com.

Immediately before moving to the current version of the TCPC website it was hosted by Google Hosted Services.  That environment didn't give us the flexibility that we get by being hosted on a "regular" hosting environment.  Therefore we were forced to use www.tcpc.com exclusively.