creative briefing

These days, everything is branded. You brand your company, you brand your products, you brand your swag, and you even brand yourself. The purpose of branding? Quite simply, to make it yours, and to make others remember that it’s yours.

Certainly, your website is also no stranger to branding. But when you think of branding your website, you’d likely first think of tailoring the site’s design, the site’s logo, or even the site’s copy to whatever you’ve decided your brand should be. What you’d least likely think of is branding your URL.

But think about it. Half the time, if your visitors aren’t arriving to your site from linked text on another site or from a bookmark, then they’re typing in your URL to get there. The act of reading your URL off your business card, or off the napkin they wrote your URL on, and then typing it into their browser is just about as direct an interaction with your brand your customers can get. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from branding, it’s that you should brand all your touch points.

Thinking about branding your URLs yet? You should be!

Here’s Part 1 of how to brand your website’s URL: to www or not to www?

Note: there have been an infinite number of articles written on how to choose the best domain name to effectively represent your brand, so I’ll skip repeating all of that and assume you already have an active domain. The following suggestions will help you more effectively brand your existing domain and URLs.

Warning: the following suggestions may also be beyond the technical know-how of your average blogger/site owner, so you may need to enlist the services of a HTML guru of some sort.

To www or not to www?

The prefix in a domain (i.e. the “www.” part) was initially used to direct an application to the right service (web, mail, ftp, etc) on the right server (that’s the short story, anyway). Today, it is no longer necessary to use “www.” to request for web content on a server, so using it is more than likely an aesthetic preference than a functional one. Many site publishers will tell you that the www. era has long been deprecated and you should stick to simply “yourwebsite.com”. Others (like me) will suggest that the www. gives your domain some visual symmetry that balances off the .com suffix.

In either case, what’s important is that you choose one convention, and stick with it. Not only will it be better for your search engine ranking (search engines will count www.yourwebsite.com and yourwebsite.com as two different sites), but it’ll prove beneficial for your brand experience, too. My big 3 rules for branding are always Consistency, Consistency, Consistency. So make the call on whether you want to be a www-er or not.

Okay, I’ve decided. Now what?

For the web heads out there, Young Go Getter recently posted a nice resource on how to ensure that your domain always reverts back to the convention you’ve chosen (i.e. typing in www.yourdomain.com will automatically convert it to yourwebsite.com), no matter what the user has typed into the browser. Check out the article here.

If you’re lazy to click and browse, here’s a quick summary:

1. Download your site’s .htaccess file (usually found in your site’s main directory). If you don’t have one, create one using notepad or your preferred text editor.
    
2. If you’d like your URLs to always start with “www.”(i.e. www.yourwebsite.com), paste the following code into the .htaccess file:
   

   Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

   If you’d like your URLs to not start with “www.”(i.e. yourwebsite.com), paste the following code into the .htaccess file:

   Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourwebsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

   In both cases, remember to replace “yourwebsite” with your actual domain name.

3. Save the file and upload it back to your site’s main directory (overwrite if necessary).

If you’re a blogger and use WordPress, you’ll find your .htaccess file in the root of your blog directory (whichever folder you’ve chosen to install your blog in). The .htaccess will likely look like this to begin with:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

In this case, you’ll want to paste the snippet of code in place of RewriteEngine On like so:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourwebsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

And there you have it. You’re now one step closer to effectively branding your website’s URL.

Deciding between using www. and not using www. is not exactly the biggest decision you’ll ever make, and it’s clearly not a detail that you can expect your customers to praise you on. The beauty of it is actually that you’ll be improving their experience with your brand without them even realizing it.

You do the URL branding, and they’ll exert the smiles (unknowingly). That’s usually how it works. :)

Check back soon for Part 2 of how to brand your website’s URL.