I've been noticing something new/different.

I've always entered my website's address / URL as "www.hatchtown.com" the leading "http://" and trailing "/index.html" were always automatically inserted/provided by the browser and/or internet internal systems.

Lately (since switching to WordPress?), I'm noticing my site's URL shows up in my browser (usually Firefox) at JUST http://hatchtown.com even when I've entered the address with the www

What's changed?!

You probably have a redirect from www.domain.com -> domain.com in your htaccess file, or directly in the webserver configuration file (less likely but possible).
It's a good thing to decide on one version, either domain.com or www.domain.com and then redirect both users and search engines to the preferred version. For the search engines it is better if a "301" redirect was set instead of one without "301". You should see something like "R=301" mentioned in your .htaccess file.

I looked at a couple of .htaccess files I found but did not see any mention of any redirect

I've kept a "legacy" file from my "old" website. It's in the root directory and it's URL as shown in the browser is "http://www.hatchtown.com/nostdir.html". Meanwhile, as soon as I click a link back into the WP installation I get URLs like "http://hatchtown.com/tools/misc-tools" (no "www").

Checking the WP Settings in the Dashboard:

WordPress address (URL) = "http://hatchtown.com/wp"

Blog address (URL) = "http://hatchtown.com"

We've always published our URL as www.hatchtown.com -- I think people expect a website to start out with the www. How do I go about getting the w's back?

If you change these

WordPress address (URL) = "http://hatchtown.com/wp"

Blog address (URL) = "http://hatchtown.com"

to

WordPress address (URL) = "http://www.hatchtown.com/wp"

Blog address (URL) = "http://www.hatchtown.com"

it should work if the web server is set to serve bot www.domain and domain from the same directory.

If not, you may have trouble getting to the site again after you made these changes. In that case you'd have to manually edit, with PHPMyAdmin or something else, in the WP database, in the table wp_options, the values of row 1 ('siteurl') and row 39 ('home')

Originally Posted by Flynn

...<snip>...it should work if the web server is set to serve bot www.domain and domain from the same directory.

If not, you may have trouble getting to the site again after you made these changes. In that case you'd have to manually edit, with PHPMyAdmin or something else, in the WP database, in the table wp_options, the values of row 1 ('siteurl') and row 39 ('home')

Okay! Now you're scaring me!!

Could this have anything to do with something GoDaddy might have done. At some point in the transition from my old html/table website to the new WP-powered one I spoke to GoDaddy tech help and I remember discussion of redirects. I don't remember the specific reason for my call to them.

I suggest that you contact Godaddy again and ask them to configure a "301 redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com" instead of the other way round