The California Travel and Tourism Commission appears to have rolled out another campaign to attract visitors to California with a new domain explaining another reason to visit.
A little while back I had seen a commercial promoting travel to the state of California and in that ad they used the domain name VisitCalifornia.com . Nice commercial, make sense domain name to go along with the ad.
Yesterday I saw a very similar commercial to the VisitCalifornia.com but this ad was tweaked a little bit and focused more on the wine and food that is offered in California.
Since this ad focused on Wine and Food, it makes sense to feature a domain name and website that is dedicated to match the ad. California does just this and used the domain name LandOfWineAndFood.com in the matching wine and food ad.
Why would they use the main domain name LandOfWineAndFood and not LandOfFoodAndWine? I think it could be something as simple as they didn’t like the double FF’s because of the the word OF in the domain. It doesn’t "look" as good and could cause a typo with somebody leaving off an F.
To cover bases, they do own both ways the domain could be remembered and visitors land at the same spot, which I give them high props for doing so! This is something that many people often miss, which can lead to missed traffic to the website.
According to whois records, California Travel and Tourism Commission owns about 102 domain names and clearly is using them to make sense with the ads they are running.
California Travel and Tourism Commission is on the right track, but their domain selection is sub-par. VisitCalifornia.com is very nice for what they are doing, but it’s no match to California.com.
LandOfWineAndFood.com is a 5-word domain name, which means the only way to remember it is to write it down. CaliforniaWine.com would be a much better domain to promote wine-related tourism.
October 26th, 2009