...and nobody noticed - or so it would seem.
I was thinking about sending a Bushwalk Tasmania SIGG bottle (the first hard item with the new logo) to the first person to notice the change, but it appears that either nobody has noticed, or nobody is concerned enough about it to comment, which is probably a good thing. I've not received a single comment in the 10 days since the changes were made, so hopefully this means that the changes have all been smooth and not caused any problems for anybody.
The two old URLs have been semi-retired, and now automatically re-direct to two new URLs as follows:
- buswhalk-tasmania.com redirects to tasmania.bushwalk.com
- bushwalkaustralia.com redirects to bushwalk.com
The two URLs still use different site names, as they've always done in the past: Ie, "Bushwalk Tasmania" and "Bushwalk Australia", respectively.
If anyone is not seeing the new site logo (ie, the one with the "bushwalk.com" URL) they might need to clear their browser's cache in order to see it.
I had initially tried to purchase the "bushwalk.com" domain name about 2 years ago, but the owner at the time said that he might consider offers over USD$20,000. So I declined to make an offer at that time. I checked it out again a few weeks ago, and I don't know if it was the same owner or not, but I put in an offer, and their first counter offer was USD$5,000. This was much more promising. We eventually settled on a price which was more than I really wanted to spend on such things, and which will take me a number of years to pay off with the current rates of advertising revenue from the site. But it's a good result overall.
The key reasons for wanting to use the new "bushwalk.com" domain name are that it's short, trivially easy to remember/type, and as generic as possible for the nature of this site. The old URL, "bushwalk-tasmania.com", was difficult to remember and frequently mistyped, and therefore people trying to find this site sometimes missed out altogether.*
Using a subdomain for one of these (ie, "tasmania.") means that the same cookie domain can be used for both sites. This reduces login/logout problems for people who use both site URLs.
*The most common mistyped variant of the old URL takes the browser to a web site which appears to be set up with the sole purpose of benefitting from such accidental visits purely by advertising revenue. That site uses the strategy that I've recently become aware of which is used by many other sites, whereby the site has some content relevant to what the user is looking for, but deliberately avoids having enough content to be truly useful for anything. The idea being that people will initially think they're at a useful site, relevant to what they're looking for, but when they're not immediately able to find the information they're looking for, they're more likely to click on links to find what they're after, including advertisements. It's a dirty trick, I reckon, but makes huge amounts of money for some people.
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