The Isle of Wight County Press were pretty early movers on publishing their news online.
While many local news publications took an age to realise that people were going to access news via the Wb, the County Press were fast out of the gate and first registered their domain name (Web address) iwcp.co.uk on 19 Jun 1998.
Well, it was noticed yesterday that their domain name of 20+ years had changed from iwcp.co.uk to countypress.co.uk
The new domain name was registered in Oct 2017, three months after the sale by its previous local owners to the Regional publishing group, Newsquest – (itself owned by American giant, Gannett)
So what?
Yes, we can understand that people might ask ‘So What?’ – Well, like it or not, we all have to live in a digital world these days and changing a domain name has some equivalence to changing the name of the publication.
Have no fear though, typing iwcp.co.uk will still get you to their Website, as it’s been setup to automatically flick over to countypress.co.uk
Why?
If we had to take a guess at why they’ve done it, it’d be SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Google et al would like the fact the name of the publication are in the domain name, giving them a higher position in search result.
Editor: Thought it only right to change
Publisher and Editor, Alan Marriott, told OnTheWight,
“The County Press was able to acquire countypress.co.uk at the end of last year and thought it only right to change our Web domain name when the time was right. Nothing else will change.”
