I know I was going to make the next post about manual bookkeeping but whilst we were away last week I couldn’t believe the huge number of businesses that had fallen into this obvious advertising and image trap.

Website hosting is so cheap and easy these days that it is no wonder most businesses have some form of online presence, and proudly include the website name and email address in their marketing materials.

And I hasten to add that is a good thing.  Unless…

The email address doesn’t match the website address.

An example of this could be my blog.  The web address is http://raystewart.biz and I naturally use an email address to match… ray@raystewart.biz. 

However… last week, on the Isle of Wight, nearly every advert that we saw had a good website address but an email address such as ray123@yahoo.com.  This was painted on the sides of coaches, bill posters, tourist magazines, newspapers, yellow pages, in fact - everywhere we looked.  It was a rare advert that had the correct email address shown.  Such a shame.

Why on earth would people want to display such a bad image to the world.  I accept that most of us have an underlying weird email address given to us by the ISP we use and have all email forwarded to this, but why show that off.  It looks really unprofessional, tatty almost, these days.

These business have gone to the effort of finding a good and relevant web address so why don’t they just set up email forwarding as well?  It is generally just a couple of mouse clicks to set it up.

The sad thing is that when I checked some of these websites, they were really posh, professional sites.  So it seems that it is the website designers letting their clients down, and a case that the clients are not aware enough of the internet to ask about the email address.

So, if you are still publishing an email address that doesn’t match the website address, change it today.  It is cheap, simple and makes such a difference to the way your business appears to the public.

If you need any help with this, or any other aspect of website hosting, then please do not hesitate to contact me.

~Ray