So what may seem like a simple task to most webmasters is getting all jacked up by whoever runs the Navy’s websites. Let’s take, for instance, navy.mil. Whoever runs this website needs to take a basic course in coding a website properly.

What most people don’t realize is that gearadrift.com and www.gearadrift.com are technically two different websites. The WWW version is a subdomain of gearadrift.com, the main domain, just like http://docinthebox.blogspot.com is a subdomain of http://blogspot.com.

Webmastering 101

What most webmasters do is either let the two sites stay as they are and simply allow www to be a copy of the main domain (like gearadrift.com) or they redirect the non-www version to the www version (like yahoo.com d0es).

Try it out, open a new window and type yahoo.com without the www and watch the address bar. You will see that yahoo.com redirects to www.yahoo.com. Both of these tactics have advantages that are outside the scope of this post.

Now, what does navy.mil do?

They don’t allow navy.mil to copy to www.navy.mil and they don’t even bother to redirect it for you. This causes navy.mil to not be found and forces the user to type in www.navy.mil. Really sloppy, if you ask me.

I checked on a couple of other websites and http://navy.com is the only one that works properly (probably managed by a different group of people).

Don’t get me started on passwords

Tell me, what good is it to have 197 different passwords that require different strength levels when you just allow a person to change it so easily.

Take the Navy Portal, http://nko.navy.mil (careful, the link probably won’t work), this website has been hailed as the “be all and end all” of all Navy websites. Have you ever been able to log on to this thing the very first time you tried?

NKO Password Strength

The password requirments are very strong, 9 character minimum consisting of: at least 2 uppercase letters, 2 lowercase letters, 2 numbers, and 2 special characters. This is probably a good idea considering the type of information on this website and what the Navy has planned for it.

Dangerous Flaw

But you can change your (or someone’s) password very easily. All I need to know is your First Name, Last Name, Birthday, and Social Security number. WTF?!?!? Has it occured to anyone how easy this information is to get?

Either make the passwords easier and reduce the sensitivity of the information of NKO or increase the requirments to change the password. You can’t have it both ways and still be safe.