Do you type the www. whenever you want to visit a site? No? Well, you are not alone.

Just as we learned that we didn’t need to say “http://” when promoting a domain, many marketers are now dropping the www as well. And since most sites are set up to redirect users to the website even without the www, people are learning they can cut out four keystrokes by skipping the “dub-dub-dub”. But what happens if your website isn’t configured correctly? You end up turning customers away like the TD Bank has been doing for years now. Try going to “td.com” — here’s what you see:

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Loads of visitors will look at this message and assume that their site is down (or has been hacked or something). Some might guess that TD just misconfigured their servers and try again with the www but the vast majority will assume the site is down.

Even if only a few thousand people over the course of a year do this, what kind of an impression does it leave on those people when they get this message? “Their site is down? I’m not sure I want to trust them with my money then!” Or (in this case), “maybe they don’t want me at their site — it says I’m not authorized. But I have an account there — did they lose it?” So here’s something for you to do *right now* — type all your domains without the www and see what you get. If you don’t get your official site, you know what you’re working on this afternoon!

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on January 30, 2006.