A few years ago we defined Lame-Ass Syndrome (LAS) in the Quirk Glossary as follows:

This unfortunate yet common syndrome results in sites that will not function without the WWW in the URL; it is caused by System Administrators presenting signs of severe “DNS laziness”.

Many people type in URL’s without using the www. When they do this and reach a site which has LAS, they will be met with an error page. Most would assume the site is down or non-existent. Even though the practice falls under basic usability, many large brands apparently ignore it and continue to frustrate potential customers. A high profile local example would be Telkom’s DoBroadband.co.za.

DoBroadband have a radio advert with a call to action that asks users to visit “dobroadband.co.za”.  However, they have neglected to properly set up their domain name system, which means when you type in this address you get this:

“The request did not specify a valid virtual host”

They specifically don’t mention the www in the advert and the fact that they are “powered” by Telkom, one of the largest internet providers in the country, makes this error even worse.

However, Telkom are not alone, as a number of other large South African brands have neglected this practice as well:

• Investec.co.za
• Moneyweb.co.za
• Fnb.co.za
• SABC.co.za
• SABC1.co.za
• SABC2.co.za
• SABC3.co.za
  
• Telkom.co.za
• BusinessDay.co.za
• EatOut.co.za

Luckily  they could all cure LAS in a matter of minutes. (After all my judgement, I should point out that I had to stroll over to the tech department to find out how it’s done, thanks John).

If your site is hosted on Apache, which many are, you can simply edit the Apache configuration file and use the re-write engine command to force a re-write. Specify that in the case someone doesn't type in the www, the browser should add it in.

If your site suffers from LAS, and what I just wrote doesn’t make any sense to you, DO go harass your system administrator to sort it out. Right Now. 

That's right folks, it's Katharina Scholtz, sorting out the Internet one site at a time.
 

***Update (2 September 2008):

It seems that everyone on this list except for Business Day and the SABC sites have been cured since this post was written. Good on ya mates. :)