I came across some rather amusing, although disturbing, marketing junk.
RRP – recommended retail price
When used in reference to domain names it is highly misleading. With IE domains, for example, you can find prices from €40/year to €99/year with most hosting providers. It doesn’t really matter what price the IEDR sells them directly at, as people are encouraged to get them at a lower price via a reseller. To say that there is an RRP is simply untrue. If there was the IEDR would inform the rest of us of this RRP.
The same is true of .com
It doesn’t matter a damn what Networksolutions charge. It is not the “RRP”
Stating that you have “invested” in infrastructure while you are actually reselling other people’s servers is also annoying, but claiming trademarks that don’t even exist has to be described as laughable.
When you combine that with wholly inaccurate technical descriptions, peppered with some of the worst spelling mistakes I’ve ever seen on a website, you really would have to wonder about a company’s credibility.
Anybody in business is aware of how impressionable the public can be, but distorting reality cannot be a winning strategy in the long term.
When I come across commercial websites (regardless of the industry) that provide inaccurate information or half-truths I wish I could label them for other visitors to see.
Fortunately I can’t
Great idea for an online directory service that gives sites a trustedness rating – bit like a press council for the web.
It could use 1-10 ranking (like Google PageRank) to grade the site.
Networksolutions might get a 1 based on your comments
Philip
Not a bad idea, but you would need quite a few volunteers to make that work. In the meantime you can always rate sites listed on search.ie 🙂
Michele