Okay, I don’t mean to pick on Black’s today but they’re making it too easy…

Where would you find Black’s Photo online?

If you said blacksphoto.com, you’d be… wrong.

The official URL for Black’s Photo is “blackphoto.com”:http://www.blackphoto.com. Note the lack of an “s” in their official domain. Now you might think that this is their fallback domain because they couldn’t get the much more obvious “with s” blacksphoto.com. That’s what I thought, after “checking that site” and finding a message that said, “No web site is configured, at this address.” But “checking the WHOIS” shows that the domain is indeed owned by Black’s Photo Corporation.

If you know anyone at Black’s Photo, please tell them read “How To: Add Spell-check To Your Domain Names” so they can fix this faux pas that must be costing them hundreds of visitors a day, if not thousands. Is this the dumbest domain name mistake made by a major Canadian firm or can you top think of a more egregious example?

Update — Aug 3, 2005 — Looks like someone at Black’s is reading One Degree because the domain issue is now straightened out. *But*, they didn’t redirect to the correct URL which would have been the best way to approach this.

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on July 18, 2005.