I have a website (www.mydomain.com) that is secured with an SSL certificate. It is an ASP.NET website and I have forced certain pages via code to be required to use the https:// prefix. If they don’t it will redirect them to the https:// equivalent. Is this a good practice? Is there an easier way to do this? Not every single page requires SSL.
Also, when the users use my URL in the form of mydomain.com instead of http://www.mydomain.com they get a certificate error because the certificate was registered for http://www.mydomain.com. Should I use the same approach as I am with the http:// and https:// issue I mentioned above? Or is there a better way of handling this?
Your approach sounds fine. In my current project, I force HTTPS when a user goes to my login page, (Based on a config flag which lets me test locally without dealing with needing a cert). This allows me to access other pages unsecured which is handy.
I have a couple places where our server grabs the output of other pages (rendering to html to PDF and fetching dynamic images for example). Because of our environment, our server can’t resolve it’s public name, so if we were to force ssl at the site we’d have to add, our internal IP address (or fake the domain name).
As for your second question you have two options to handle the http://www.example.com vs example.com. You can buy a certificate that allows you to have multiple domain names. These are known as UCC certificates.
Your second option is to redirect example.com to http://www.example.com or the other way around. Redirecting is a great option if want your content to be indexed by google or other search engines. Since they will see http://www.example.com and example.com as two seperate sites. This means that links to your sites will be split reducing your overall page rank.