How not to grow the worth of your .au domain name

Clarrie Rivers sent me at link to lcreview.com.au which in turn was the starting point for this post.

Originally people on the NSW North Coast knew lcreview.com.au as a digital address associated with the free weekly community newspaper The Lower Clarence Review, until it broadened its horizons to become the Clarence Valley Review accompanied by an online presence at www.cvreview.com.au.

This eventually left its original digital address an unclaimed orphan wandering out there in cyberspace.

It appears to have been snapped up by Publishing Australia Pty Ltd (formerly Netfleet Pty Ltd) - a buyer and seller of Australian domain names.

This company is reportedly owned by David Lye and his brother Mark.

Now the new owner of the domain name apparently decided to position it in such a way that it might take whatever advantage there maybe in developing site content to draw traffic numbers which in turn enhance the possibility of re-sale. The site collects as much information as possible about its visitors as well.

This is where the exercise becomes amusing for Northern Rivers residents.

Not only did the web designer not realise that Grafton is not in the Lower Clarence Valley and so is not a direct match for the domain name; the very generalised desciptions of this regional city and the Clarence River area (along with the links) leave one wondering if the website is speaking about Clarence Valley in New South Wales or some other valley in an alternate universe.

The air of unreality is made worse by two of the photographs used on the homepage as seen here:

These are clearly not images of Grafton, NSW Australia, but of Upper Grafton Street in Dublin, Ireland (pictured below) in the Northern Hemisphere.

This is one of the many images of the real NSW North Coast City of Grafton's main shopping street which can be easily found on the world wide web:

Is it any wonder that Alexa: The Web Information Company gives the site a global three-month traffic rank of 8,788,387 - a number which probably hasn't altered all that much since it was owned by local media.

Being kind, I personally rate the value of lcreview.com.au at $1.