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Standardize Tech URLs

It’s time for Georgia Tech to clean up its website addresses. Students, employees, and visitors waste their time and energy trying to figure out whether each department has chosen to prefix their website with www.

Those three little letters -www- aren’t necessary when finding most websites, but become crucial when attempting to guess which way a Tech website is configured. When visiting the College of Computing website, the www is required. The address cc.gatech.edu is a dead end; only www.cc.gatech.edu works.

However, to mix things up, www.oscar.gatech.edu is a dead end. It is only possible to access OSCAR by leaving the www off. This issue should be relatively easy to fix; it simply requires someone to have the initiative. The College of Management, has figured out how to make both www.mgt.gatech.edu and mgt.gatech.edu work together seamlessly. This is not just an internal issue.

Our websites are a large part of how Georgia Tech is perceived by the world. If you have a person’s email address and want to find out more about them, a logical action is to visit the domain associated with their email. For example, my email address is @cc.gatech.edu. When a potential employer visits that address, they are greeted by an error message instead of information about my college.

As long as Tech is cleaning up its webspace, how about pointing webmail.gatech.edu to the webmail system? And bookstore.gatech.edu to the bookstore? Oh yeah, and how about technique.gatech.edu (found in editor@technique.gatech.edu) actually pointing to the Technique’s website?

Scott Ehardt

Fifth-year CompE