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Category: Ken Schafer

gordonandfrank.ca

Published February 6, 2006

Bell’s new mascots – two talking beavers named Frank and Gordon – have an eponymous web site – frankandgordon.ca.
I’m glad to see that the folks working on the site heeded One Degree’s recent advice and allow people to drop the "www" and still get to the site.
I also really like that they registered the .com version of the domain but still use the .ca in the ads to make it clear this is a Canadian thing.

Frankandgordon

Unfortunately they didn’t read an older One Degree post called How To Add Spell-check To Your Domain Names (go read it, I’ll wait). Now there might be some obvious typo domains that they could have registered (and they may have for that matter – I didn’t check them all), but I know they missed a really big and obvious problem with that domain.
Imagine this scenario which is close but not quite what Bell’s marketers imagined happening:

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Some People Think TD.com Is Always Offline

Published January 30, 2006

Do you type the www. whenever you want to visit a site? No? Well, you are not alone.
Just as we learned that we didn’t need to say “http://” when promoting a domain, many marketers are now dropping the www as well.
And since most sites are set up to redirect users to the web site even without the www, people are learning they can cut out four keystrokes by skipping the “dub-dub-dub”.
But what happens if _your_ web site isn’t configured correctly?
You end up turning customers away like the TD Bank has been doing for years now.
Try going to “td.com”:http://td.com – here’s what you see:
TD.com Unavailable image
Loads of visitors will look at this message and assume that their site is down (or has been hacked or something).
Some might guess that TD just mis-configured their servers and try again with the www but the vast majority will assume the site is down.

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Can You Take "Less" Too Far?

Published December 8, 2005

To follow on from my “Getting Clients Involved In Less”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2005/12/08/getting-clients-involved-in-less post, I thought I’d share what I’ve done with my corporate site at “schafer.com”:http://www.schafer.com/.
My site has gone through many changes in the just under 10 years I’ve been running it (the site will be into double digits in January). It shrinks and expands in direct proportion to the clarity I have around what I’m offering my clients.
Usually when I introduce a new service or change what I’m doing, I end up adding more to the site to make sure people understand the new stuff we’re offering. But after a while I realize that most of what I was saying didn’t really matter and could be done away with. Then the site starts to shrink again.
A few weeks ago I launched a new version of the site – probably the sparest iteration since our “hello world” page a decade ago. It’s four pages long. The logo is the only image on the site. Nothing dynamic, web 2.0, Flash-enabled, or even particularly exciting.

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