[Andy]

Ideally choose www or without www and stick with it, 301 redirect one to the other. That way you "canonicalise" your URL's so you don't cause duplicate pages, search engines don't like that. Use a htaccess rule to do it site wide and so parameters and resource URL's get passed no matter how you type the URL in.

[K.Kode]

Just create a CNAME entry for WWW on your DNS

[bianorek]

Good to hear that, redirect 301 helping alot for a website.
and you have very nice website

[InSitu]

Thanks Everyone.

I do now have both and a webdeveloper has redirected the www. site to my other, im happy with this as long as google are.
As a point of interest though csc2ya i had initially experienced email problems.... but this too seems to have been resolved when the new web developer took over and looked at redirecting one site to the other.

Much appreciated advice
Alex

[Trapper]

Hi InSitu,

Welcome to the forum.

Personally I always ensure both will resolve to the same IP address, and then create bindings for both to a single website. The only problem can be that Google (other search engines are available) *may* see them as separate sites. You should therefore either use a canonical meta tag (to tell search engines which you prefer), or do as csc2ya states and force a forward from one to the other.

Which one you make the primary is up to you...

HTH
~Trap

[csc2ya]

I personally use both, since my site is on a vps and my dns and e-mail is on a dedicated server.

I've had issues with e-mails being rejected after failing hostname checks, so what I ended up doing is setting up both www and non www subdomains.

The non www domain goes to the dedicated ip and is redirected to www (which goes to my vps ip) by html files in the corresponding web directory (mydomain.com/forum redirects to www.mydomain.com/forum for example). Probably a bit of a hackish way of doing it, but that seemed to sort the issues I was having with e-mail being rejected by the receipient's mailservers.

[Razakel]

Hi all

I am not a web developer so am a bit confused over the difference between placing www. at the beginning of a website or just going without.
Are there any benefits to having your site land specifically on one or the other?

My website completely bypasses the www even though i bought a domain name that clearly stated a full address.

Users will habitually type www.example.com rather than example.com, so it's good practice to use both.

What you want to do is create the subdomain "www" and point it to the same place as your domain. You own your domain, so you can create as many subdomains as you want (e.g. www., mail. support., etc).

Some sites enforce a canonical URL, e.g. if a user accesses example.com they'll be automatically redirected to www.example.com.

[InSitu]

Hi all

I am not a web developer so am a bit confused over the difference between placing www. at the beginning of a website or just going without.
Are there any benefits to having your site land specifically on one or the other?

My website completely bypasses the www even though i bought a domain name that clearly stated a full address.