Word out of Lorain County OH is that officials there failed to renew the URL for their DMO...and it now directs visitors to a gaming website in Indonesia. Amid the finger pointing going on, one County official said that the lost URL is a moot point because they want all their websites to be .gov, because that's the way the public knows that a site is a legitimate government website.
Excuse me? A legitimate government website is the last place I'd go for travel inspiration and information.
But, here's the learning moment (which we've touched on several times before). When a DMO (or really, any enterprise) decides to move on from one URL to a better URL, you must keep renewing (and owning) the old URL...forever. Every destination has visitors that have learned or love a past URL (we were fans of the no longer used nawlins.com). But, New Orleans & Company was smart enough to know that, while the old URL didn't produce the traffic they had expected, they needed to retain the URL and have it redirect to neworleans.com. Once you acquire a URL...you hafta continue to own it til the day you die...or face the consequence of having it snatched up by someone else.
What happened to Lorain County isn't the worst we've seen. That would be DMOs that have dropped old URLs only to have them picked up by porn sites. But honestly, walking away from a URL is never a good idea...even if you know you'll never use it again.
Do you know the renewal date for yours?
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