Upper case vs. lower case web addresses

A question noobies frequently ask me is whether or not they need to type in web site addresses in upper case or lower case. My answer is to them is to always just assume lower case. The real answer, however, is that it doesn’t matter. As new domain names become harder and harder to come by, companies are starting to register longer domain names. Take Noobie for instance. The web address for Noobie is www.noobieInc.com. To me that is easily recognized as Noobie, Inc. But to others it doesn’t register until I explain it to them. That’s why I’ve started writing my web address as www.NoobieInc.com. Now that’s a lot easier to recognize, don’t you think?

The point is that it doesn’t matter whether you enter www.noobieInc.com, www.NoobieInc.com or WWW.NOOBIEINC.COM in your Internet browser. They will all work. There is one caveat to this, however. If you are typing a web address that contains more information after the domain suffix (the .com, .net. .org, etc. part of the web address), that could very well be case sensitive. You’ll have to trust me on this when I say it really depends on what kind of web server a web site is running on.

Take one of Noobie’s sub-pages for example. Noobie recently announced an online banking and bill pay seminar. The direct link to the landing page for the seminar is www.NoobieInc.com/OldNational. However, if you were to type www.noobieinc.com/oldnational it wouldn’t go to the same location, although I have compensated for that on the Noobie web site and made sure both really do work.

The long and short of it is, if you are just entering the http://www.something-here.com part of the domain you can enter it in any case your heart desires. But if you see any longer web site addresses, you should enter the web site address exactly as you see it. Happy surfing!