Although I do web hosting, I haven't really thought about whether it's better to have www in front of a domain or not. Having a look around and noticed that most websites still use www.
In your opinion, do you think it's better to have that? or it simply doesn't matter?
Obviously though, have it or not they all have to be directed to the same website.
As far as I'm aware that it's a subdomain, I'm not sure why it has the tradition of being used as the main website/home page?
I'd assume when most people enter a URL in the browser, they'd just enter the domain like "google.com" or "ozbargain.com.au" instead of having www.
what does it stand for? world wide web?
Yes, that's what it stands for. Sites generally work fine both ways, so as long as yours does, I think you can please yourself.
Yes world wide web. Note that the hierarchical domain name system predates world wide web. Organizations and universities might already use DNS so when they launch their "website" it makes sense for them to create www subdomain to distinguish from the rest of their network.
These days people think internet = website…
These days people tend to create website domains named their purpose, e.g. upload.ozbargain.com.au, courses.edx.org, login.dyndns.com, and so forth.
So separate from the question of whether to have an additional www that goes to the main site, you may wish to create subdomains for the other uses and not prematurely lump them all into the main site. It's far easier to make one site handle multiple sites at the beginning, than to extricate different uses from one site in hindsight.
Well, from my point of view, www is something that is stuck in the 20th century.
Just use redirects, www.domain.com > domain.com also redirects for pages not found, hate it when you go to an old link or bookmark and the 404 does not redirect you to the main site
domain.com works for me. :/
You should always do a redirect in .htaccess so if the user puts in "example.com" it redirects to "www.example.com". Otherwise if you are running analytics you may end up with two entries for each page (one with www and one without). Not redirecting can also split your SEO rankings between www and non-www.
Edit: Just to clarify, I build mainly corporate websites so tend to keep the www but either way is fine as long as you keep it consistent. You may want to look at what other people in your industry use, I know leaving www out is common in the tech industry for instance.
Regardless of your decision. You should always redirect one to the other.
Additional links:
http://no-www.org/
http://www.yes-www.org/
http://www.www.extra-www.org/
I couldn't stop laughing when I saw the extra www one…
Non WWW is valuable if you are building a new website in 2014, look at sites like Twitter ect they have all adopted non-www versions of the site.
Yet if you have a pre existing website with a long term link profile you would want to stick with www. on the domain.
"www" is just a sub-domain. Do you intend to use other sub-domains? If Yes, then maybe having "www" would be preferred to distinguish your main website with other sub-domains. However if your domain is only going to be used for that one single website and nothing else — then in this case without the "www" sub-domain is fine.