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Washington
D.C.) on our 25th wedding
anniversary last month (I will continue
to make it up this summer with other
long weekend getaways like this). Don't
get me wrong - we both had a great
time at Roundtable and enjoyed
celebrating the event among friends -
but an occasion like this also needs to
be marked in a non-business
setting. So,
even though I took my laptop along, I
only went online briefly a couple of
times after we made the two hour drive
from our home just north of Tampa
to Mount Dora Friday morning. But you
know me - I never stop paying attention
to domain names and the trip to Mount
Dora gave me plenty of fodder for a new
Lowdown item - this one. We
would be visiting Mount Dora for the first
time so I did a lot of Internet
research on the resort town before
going, picking the place we would stay
(that wound up being the Magnolia
Inn bed & breakfast, a
delightful place that was even better
than it looked online), plus restaurants
and shops we wanted to visit and things
we wanted to do when we got there. The
first thing I did was go to MountDora.com
to see who owned it. That turned out to
be the local chamber of commerce.
They have a serviceable site but their
business directories didn't give me the reviews
I was looking for so I could start
making choices. So I typed "Mount
Dora" into Google to see what the
search engine would turn up. The second
search result (after MountDora.com) was
the city's official website
located, unfortunately, at a very
unsightly address, so bad it is hard to
believe they use it - ci.mount-dora.fl.us!
No joke. Three dots and a hyphen thrown
in for good measure. As
a .us fan myself, I have no quibble with
the city using a .us domain (they have
always been popular with government
sites and in fact were available to government
entities only until April 2002 when
there were opened to everyone else in
America). However why use a name like
this instead of oh...just grasping at
straws here...say something like MountDora.us?
Out of curiosity I looked up who owned
that and was surprised to find that I
did. Again
no joke. I have no recollection of
picking it up, but with over 6,000
domains I've been surprised like this a
number of times in the past. Still, I do
know the city could have taken it before
.us was opened to the general public (it
wasn't registered for the first time
until a couple of weeks after .us was
available for general registration). The
city site's high Google ranking shows
that the extension (and laborious name)
is not an impediment to finding them in
search engines, but I can't imagine how
much ci.mount-dora.fl.us must get butchered
when people try to type it in (and
forget about trying to remember a
name like that). I
came across another inscrutable choice
of domains while researching Mount Dora
in Google. The third free result (and
top paid result) was for a site at WhatToDoInMtDora.com.
I kid you not. A six-word domain name -
actually five words and an abbreviation.
The name for this general city
guide again shows content can overcome a
tortured domain name in search engines -
but for giving people an easy name to
remember so they can type it in, this
one would not have been high on my list
(to their credit they were smart enough
to also register WhatToDoInMountDora.com
and redirect it to their site to
eliminate at least one obvious typo.
Mount Dora is the common spelling, not
Mt. Dora). I think something simpler
like MountDoraGuide.com would
have worked better for them. When I
looked it up, I found that name was
unregistered and I liked it well
enough to take it. |
The
Donnelly House (above) was built
by Mount Dora's first mayor,
John Phillip Donnelly, in 1893. It
is now on the National Register of
Historic Places and was one of the first
places we stopped as we love Victorian
architecture.
The
Magnolia Inn in Mount Dora
- good reviews on TripAdvisor.com
steered us to this marvelous bed &
breakfast two blocks from downtown and
it was even better than we expected.
They have a decent domain name too - MagnoliaInn.net. 
Diana
in the parlor at the Magnolia
Inn.
Sunset
on Lake Dora. 
This
wooden boardwalk meanders through a
spectacular 8-acre nature preserve on
the banks of Lake Dora.
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