www.sintbernadus.be

Apparently Saint is spelled Sint in Dutch which is the most popular language in Belgium which is where this brewery hails from which is why I won't fall them for choosing this URL. But not also buying SaintBernadus.be and displaying the URL in alllowercase are 2 unforgivable sins.

EMAIL www.amvetspickup.com

And just how would one do that?

att.con

Whoever put the stickers on this truck should be con-victed!

www.agremodeling.com

Maybe it's because I had my eyes on the dash trying to figure out the name of the tune I was jamming to or maybe it's because I'm an URL-aholic but I read the back of this truck bottom up. So my first encounter was with the URL. "Hmmm... AgreModeling.com... sweet!" I thought as I turned my gaze up expecting to find a bunch of hot models sitting in the back of the truck. "DOH!"

www.funerals.pro

Sorry I've been slacking my fellow URLaholics. Please know that I am not yet cured, just busy with other obsessions. You know you're out of the loop when you see a TLD that you didn't know existing. Now I realize I'm no domaining .pro but who knew!?!

facebook.com/siriusxmjamon

Great station. Bad URL. Like an extended jam, this URL wraps to second line. Never liked the character limits on Sirius XM. Always cuts off artist or title. Didn't even know wrapping was possible until I saw this. There has to be a way they can play with fonts or allow you to click to see full names.

Back to this URL, alllowercasedoesn't do it any favors. Too many weird letters. This URL is obscure as some of the bands they play.

www.chick-fil-aleadercast.com/atlanta

Here's another SkewURL (for the uninitiated, those are URLs spotted by URL-aholic Peter Askew of Search Bound) from Chick-Fil-A . Peter seems to eat there a lot!

This one is a mess of mashed up alllowercase and an ill-advised /slash. As Peter points, out it should've been Chick-Fil-A.com/LeadercastAtlanta or dropped Atlanta altogether and had a drop-down on the landing page.

As it stands, this URL is not chic. It's not ful-fil-ling. And it grades an F not an A.

http://bit.ly/dn5n10

Here's a tip when using bit.ly or other URL shorteners in print. Customize them! Too tough to tell the difference between zero and letter O and one and letter L. And this one ends with both. Oy vey! Thanks again to Brian Leiberman for the spot and reminding us that a little bit of extra effort goes a long way.

alllowercase.google.urls/CamelCaseHere

Google recently announced that all domains in search ad display URLs would appear in alllowercase. "For example, if your display URL is Subdomain.Example.com/Subdirectory, it will appear as subdomain.example.com/Subdirectory."

Fellow URL-aholics know this is not a best practice for making your domain easy to decipher. Yet, Google says, "Recently, we found that by standardizing the look of the URLs on the page, we were able to improve many of our user metrics, including ad clickthrough rates." Maybe that's because of all the accidental clicks resulting from people not being able to easily recognize the domain they're clicking on!

What does this mean for all the Google advertisers out there? Wherever possible, use Subdirectories for your search ad landing pages as opposed to Subdomains. On a crowded Google results page, if you want to stand out from the clutter and pre-qualify your clicks, use Camel Case Subdirectories to let searchers know what they should expect to find on your site.

adultstudies.trnty.edu

And a few vowels could change your URL!

www.exercisetv.tv./fitness360

What is it with Ex-er-cise-tv-dot-tv? Not only is it a Bad URL but it has no concept of how to display itself. Not what you'd expect from a franchise devoted to improving one's appearance. Here, they not only present a mess of alllowercase preceded by Dubs and followed by a slash but theres an extra dot thrown in for good measure that makes this not even a functioning URL. Dot's not very nice.

officedeskandchairexperts.com

Here's one from our good friend and Duke of URL, Aaron Bynum. In his words...

"Attached here is a screenshot from a local (Champaign, IL) TV commercial by a furniture business.

I'm a bit stumped as to why they plaster the URL 'officedeskandchairexperts.com' in the TV commercial, when the URL is just a redirect to 'IllniSupply.com'... it seems like a wasted effort."

As I mentioned in my reply to Aaron, while this URL is great for SEO purposes, it doesn't quite roll off the tongue... or casters.

And the alllowercase is doing them no favors. Anytime I see a lower case URL with experts in it, I always think of expertsexchange.com.

When promoting their website, this URL should be desk-arded.

www.mayo-clinic-jobs.com

Alichia Keller was on-the-spot with this bad banner ad. 3 dashes does not exactly make this URL dashing.

www.carpetcleaning.cc

I don't hate the alternate domain (non-dot-com) because it bares the initials of the key words. It sucks that the decal has the first "c" caught in the crevice though. Dot-cc is already a not easily recognized TLD, much less when half of one of the letters is cut off. This URL's gonna make ya sweat til ya bleed. Finally, it's happened to me.

1forall.us

Here's another SkewURL (that would be Askew-URLs for the uninitiated). Peter thought this was "cringe-worthy" but I don't mind the URL selection. Would love to see Leading Caps, though. 1ForAll.us. Now that's something I can get behind. If they really want this website to stand for something, they should make those letters stand out!

adultstudies.trnty.edu

Oh, Christ! Where to begin? The alllowercase? The non-intuitive abbreviation? Reminds me of Flutter, the parody of Twitter featuring a "nano-blogging" platform that strips out the vowels. 2 thmbs dwn fr ths bd rl.

inafj.org

The URL-icious Alichia Keller pointed me to this Yahoo! News article covering a campaign by unemployed residents of Buffalo, NY to get the attention of Obama on job creation. Don't love how they used the acronym for this slang as their URL. Acronyms/Abbreviations only work when the result is something easily recognizable. And that question mark before the URL only confuses matters even further. Is that part of the URL or not? Let's just hope these folks aren't trying to get jobs in marketing.

www.PerfectlyGoodAirplane.com, perfectlygoodairplane.com

Saw this rotating ad on a truck parked at the Hard Rock Chicago. Not sure why they had to go and ruin a perfectly good URL with dubs and alllowercase.

www.nuoviuffizi.com

I just returned from holiday in Italy. I was out there for a good friend’s wedding and my wife and I tacked on a few extra days for sight-seeing. I had fully intended on taking a break from URL-spotting and swapping URL-aholism for one of my other aholism vices (after all, we were in the land of vino) but I just couldn’t escape it.

Here we were in the political square of Florence admiring the original home of Michaelangelo’s David sculpture and out pops a digital billboard promoting the new Uffizi. It was like we’d been transported from ancient Italy to Times Square. And, as if intrusive advertising in a historically significant location weren’t enough, they topped it off with a bad URL!

I’ve softened my stance on using www (aka Dubs) so I won’t penalize them for that nor will I dispute the use of dot-com in the land of dot-IT because they are targeting tourists but I do take issue with the use of alllowercase. I would also like to penalize them for imposing their modern will against an medieval backdrop. There should be a penal code against posting digitalia within 100 yards of David’s genatalia!

www.misteroptik.it

Here’s another bad Florentine URL. This one uses the native TLD (.it) but fails to use Leading Caps to distinguish the words. With a name like Optik, that has the inverse of the TLD buried in it, the result is an optical illusion in which the “ti” and the “it” can easily become inverted. This Mister could stand a little fiber-optics in his diet.