I'm going to have to agree with Jared here (I never seem to agree with you when listening to your podcasts, but when you're writing here I always do for some reason).
Most users are not going to notice. Also, how do you know that people are not going to know that pear.com is related to fruit.com. There is absolutely no way that you can know that. Maybe the users know perfectly well that pear is a sub-brand of fruit. For example, when we folded the various child cooking magazines into the banner website of http://www.tasteofhome.com (check http://www.quickcooking.com and http://www.simpleanddelicious.com), no one really had any complaints about it, and some people even commented that they had no idea that there was so much more content available to them as a subscriber of one of the child magazines. We also used all sorts of marketing and contest domains that redirect to domains on a main site (both going to sub-pages on tasteofhome.com and rd.com) that again posed absolutely no problems with our users. Your example of banking sites makes a good point, but it is a very limited case. Most sites out there are not dealing with this sort of situation. If you are dealing with a page showing content and not a page asking for secure credentials, it really isn't going to matter. On Dec 28, 2009, at 4:14 PM, live wrote: Yes, that completely erodes trust because the user has no idea that fruit and pear are related companies. Additionally, with all the phishing scams out there consumers are more and more being taught to pay attention to the domain. Heck, even my credit union is reminding us that it doesn't matter what the page looks like, it matter what the domain says . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=48094 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
