tlds

If You Can’t Even Remember Your Own Website Don’t Expect Others To…

I got an inquiry from a Hong Kong company about a New gTLD domain name I own. My domain name is an exact left.right match of their generic 2-word company name.

They are currently using a .com.hk domain name for their website. For some strange, at least to me, reason they have chosen (?) not to register the .hk version of their name even though it is now available for anyone to register. Their web development company that handles the domain registrations for them is using a .hk domain. Yet they probably don’t care. All they care is to build an expensive website on any domain name even if no one ever visits it again.

I have found out that in countries that allow both first level registrations like .hk and second level registrations like .com.hk for years, people tend to either remember .com or .hk when presented with a .com.hk url. So their customers are either typing .hk going to a not found page or they are typing .com that takes them to a webpage owned by a totally different company in some other part of the planet.

To make matters worse their “contact us” page lists the wrong email address for the company. They have written info@**********.com instead of info@**********.com.hk. And the email address link is wrong too. I checked archive.org and the email address is wrong for at least a year now. No one has discovered the mistake. A first the mistake was solely on the web development company but after all this time I have to blame the company that contacted me. They don’t ever visit their website? It is not like it has more than 10 pages…

Are there more mistakes like this? Maybe on business cards, stationary or even ads? Who knows…

So if you can’t even remember your own website how can you expect others to remember it?

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About Konstantinos Zournas

I studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science in London, UK and I am now living in Athens, Greece. I went online in 1995, started coding in 1996 and began buying domain names and creating websites in 2000. I started the OnlineDomain.com blog in 2012.

6 comments

  1. Good point. This is one of the areas where a good left.right domain name is shining.

  2. Developers that don’t pay attention to detail and middle managers that don’t do due diligence. 😀

  3. Ahah glad to hear I’m not the only seeing this kind of things 🙂

  4. I’ve seen this kind of thing as well even on large corporate websites where you’d think there are more checks and balances. And also something as simple as renewing the domain name. It goes into delete and no one at the company knows and the name drops.

  5. Maybe they never checked their site, but maybe they did. It’s amazing how what we expect to see blinds us. Always a good idea to ask a friend (if not an actual proof reader) to be a second set of eyes.

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