There are often questions about how to link to certain pages or whether to include a slash or not. And if one should use www or shouldn’t use it.
The question here is not what the right thing is. The question is just how you want it to be. And that is the most difficult part in here. You have to decide with which method you want to go. What do you want your links to look like? Do you want to use ‘www’, because everyone expects it to be there or do you think ‘Hey, who needs thats?’.
So make your decision. But just pick one of all possiblities. You can’t have it all. “I want this, and this, and one of these…” Nope, not possible. Just one.
After you have decided, go with that method. Build your links that way. Then you can use mod_rewrite to ensure that everyone uses your pages the same as you. That means you redirect everyone who does not use www to the www version, if you decided to use www. If you decided to use trailing slashes after directory names, then always link to them that way. And redirect wrong requests to the appropriate pages.
Here are some points in which you should make a decision:
1. domain name
www.example.com or example.com
2. home page
should it be just / (highly recommended) or should it be /index.php, /index.htm, /home/start.asp
3. directories or pages
/about or /about/