Initially one of the things that I really liked about choosing my new website URL was that http://rik.onl looked so nice and short.  However, I stumbled across a blog post written by Troy Hunt which covers how he created his new blog, and it points to a website called www. is not deprecated.

Having read his blog post and the site in more detail, I agreed with them entirely, that the technical benefits outweighed any slight aesthetic incentive that I saw, and so I switched my site to use www.riklewis.com as the canonical URL.

Now that I’ve switched, I quite like it and feel it looks nicely balanced, but maybe 3.3.3 characters is not something everyone looks for in a URL!

On a more technical note, this is achieved by adding the following meta tag to the source…

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.riklewis.com/index.php">

I’ve also changed WCG Online to use www.wcg.onl as the canonical URL, instead of the original wcg.onl, and I encourage you to do the same with your websites.