Technovangelism

When trying to advertise your website, particularly on television, how should your url be displayed? There is a big debate about whether or not a site should be accessible without the www subdomain and that should apply to displaying your url as plain text as well. If the homepage of your site is at www.example.com, should you advertise your site exactly as it will be seen in the browser (http:// included), as www.example.com, or can you get away with just example.com? And what about the styling of your url when it is displayed in text? Is it ok to use multiple colors? Will different colors and combinations affect readability or a reader’s ability to recall the url?

I recently saw a commercial advertising the Art Institute of Raleigh-Durham. In the ad, the url was displayed like this aidurham.com. I assume they do this because the red “ai” matches their logo, but at first glance in the commercial, all I saw was durham.com. Only after it flashed on screen a few more times did I notice it was really aidurham.com. I suppose the red “ai” prevents me from thinking I’m visiting “aid ur ham.com,” but the price paid in losing a visitor to the wrong url is not worth having your url match your site logo simply for styling purposes. I’ve never seen a flickr add on television, but do you think it would display the url like this flickr.com? With a different colored “r” it would be far too easy to completely miss it and think the website address is flick.com.

A website address should only be displayed in one color. Even if the address is made of multiple words, it needs to be in one color so parts of it are not lost. If you are worried the words won’t show through and will make memorizing the address difficult, saying the address aloud will let the viewer know how to break up the address properly so he can remember it for later. The aidurham commercial repeatedly said “a-i-durham.com” and this would have been plenty to let the viewer discern the correct url, but using different colors was enough to undo all of the work saying the address aloud did.