I saw quite a few URLs on Vehicles in the bigger cities in Italy. This one was promoting the Instituti Di Vigilanza Reuniti D?Ital. Can?t fault the URL selection here but I don?t love the alllowercase display. I much prefer ALLCAPS when it comes to Abbreviations as that makes the series of letters much more recognizable as an abbreviation and not s...

This sign was promoting rooms available in La Spezia near the train station. Once again, a few Leading Caps would?ve gone a long way. Maybe all the way to La Luna.

We stumbled upon this URL in the train station at Vernazza, which is one of the small fisherman villages in Cinque Terre, located on the Italian coast, just East of Pisa. The ugliness of this URL was a stark contrast to the natural beauty of this region. Clearly, it?s aimed for tourists, so it?s a good use of dot-com but squeezing the words togethe...

This one features great presentation with Leading Caps but I?m not sure about pairing English words with a .it domain? That would be like having a glass of Chardonnay with a beefsteak.

Here?s another Arezzo alllowercase folly. Let?s hope the art doesn?t leave as much room for misinterpretation as the URL does.

Don't mind the lower-case "h" following the 5 becase "5Hour" might not have lined up right but can't forgive the lower-case "e." You may think I'm just being a stickler here and that anyone can figure out the URL because it's the brand name but the brand name has a hyphen so people already have to think a little to figure out if there's a hyphen in...

Here's one I caught while on hiatus. Good cause. Bad URL. Hope it didn't cost them donations.

While I was on hiatus, Bob Kahns picked up the URL-spotting slack, filling my inbox with nuggets like this one. He likes this logo URL "but at the same time it looks a bit funny with the .com so large." I agree whURL-heartedly. It is funny looking but it does gets you looking. And, even though the fonts and treatments don't go together, there's no ...

URL-aholic Jeremy Williams reminds us that Leading Caps are as important on Twitter as they are when promoting domain names. As I once tweeted... #curseallyoupeopleandyourlowercasehashtags #IsntThisEasierToRead? Have we learned nothing from http://GoodURLBadURL??? (Of course, I had to use the http in the tweet so that the URL would be hyperlinked s...

Peter Askew, of SkewURL fame, captured this oddity that shows up in the final frame of a Coldwell Banker TV ad. It looks like an URL, it's placed like an URL (briefly at the end of the spot) but it's a NotURL. While I applaud Coldwell Banker for promoting its iPhone and Android apps along with its website (thankfully they stopped short of including...

It's time to out the women and children to bed and put on your URL-spotting hat. GUBU is back, baby! Thanks to all the faithful URL-aholics out there for your patience -- hopefully you haven't kicked the habit! You'll be happy to know my book is in the hands of the publisher and scheduled for an August release. FYI, it's now available for pre-order...

Here's another submission from Mr. Kahns. As Lesson #5 in my forthcoming book, "Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google," dictates, it's critical to "Be Where Your Audience Is." That means creating a presence in all the various social media outlets to engage customers and prospects -- or, in this case, music fans -- on their time an...

This will be my last post for a while. Taking a little hiatus so I can focus on writing my book, Everything I Need to Know About Marketing I Learned From Google, which will be published by McGraw-Hill in the Fall. More details on that project at LearnFromGoogle.com. While I'll be covering more than URL best practices, you can be sure I'll pepper s...

Here's another SkewURL -- Peter Askew's 39th submission to date. He points out the spacing issues that could cause some to read this as GoFollowApolo.com. I have to agree that the placement of that "go" button is odd. This URL can't skate thru on alternating fonts alone.

Peter Askew checks in with his 37th SkewURL. The man is a one man wreck-URLing machine. And while this cup may be eco-friendly (although I bet the folks over at Beta Cup would have something to say about that), the URL is not exactly reader-friendly. In fact, I'd go so far as say it's f-k'ed up. Iced coffee may go well with a dash of sugar but URLs...

This goes to show that movie URLs do not need to be long adaptations of movie title dash the movie dot com. Rather, they can pose intrigue and, when paired with a clean display, be very effective. Let's hope this is not the end of good movie URLs.

Here's another SkewURL. Nice slogan integration and Leading Caps aid in readability. My only problem with it is that some may read this quickly has StartHealthyStartHealthy.com or StayHealthyStayHealthy.com. Alternating Fonts would've gone a long way here. Otherwise, this URL is smooth as a baby's butt!

And here's one more submitted by LivURLlicious via Facebook. This is definitely a Slurl. Wonder if the parishioners knew what kind of transfiguration they were in for when they joined this Church?

This just in via @sfallows on Twitter. (Reminder: you can tweet the URLs you spot to @GoodURLBadURL and I'll post 'em.) I won't call this one out for being too loooooong -- it is only 4 words after all. But the alllowercase and single font make it tough to decipher. As the Cherokee Kid might've said, "I know you don't want to go to heaven sober, so...

Mr. Askew checks in again with this sporty URL. Nice integration of the ESPN logo and local customization, although methinks the "Log on to..." call to action is a bit dated. All in all, this URL's got its game-face on.

I swear Peter Askew has too much time on his hands. This is his 34th submission. As he put it, "it's long but ain't half-bad." Yes, he was referring to the URL.

Nate White sent this in via the Facebook GUBU page. Apparently, this was the logo on the box of a pair of Dockers he bought. Nate called it a NotURL and I like that tag so much I've created a new category for it. These shoes may do it all but they most certainly can't create new TLD's... yet!

Bridget Buysse spotted this URL while planning a big night out with her girlfriends. Of course, the irony here is that Bing is Microsoft's newly branded search engine. While I can't blame them for buying a SEM-ingly irrelevant keyword (as they want to capture anyone errantly typing the URL into a search box), you'd think they'd know the importance ...

Unlike Wyoming, Minnesota's URL is in a state of disrepair. Staggering the words across different lines creates spacing issues and makes it hard to tell if the URL is exploreMinnesota.com or if they want you to explore Minnesota.com. Even that cursive script is hard to read. There are just so minney things wrong with this URL!

If ALLCAPS acronyms (eg, www.FJVW.com) are at one end of the spectrum, alllowercase looooong URLs are at the other. And adding dubs sure doesn't help in either case. Unfortunately, like Jimmy Fallon himself, this URL is not funny, just funny lookin'.

The next 2 in the lineup didn't fare much better, again buckling under alllowercase and ALLCAPS screwballs. The latter was able to at least stay alive with alternating fonts but it takes a perfect pitch to make it 500 feet from the plate.

I had a field day at Wrigley the other week. From my seat in the upper deck I could just barely make out the URLs on the rooftops with full zoom. I can only image what a hard time it must've been for anyone else to read them. This one sure didn't help by burying the words with dubs and ALLCAPS. You know where I'm going with this... this URL was don...

All these bad URLs with variations on the words Wrigley and Rooftop only reinforce how important it is to use Leading Caps. At a glance, who's going to remember if it was Wrigleyville, rooftop singular, or any other combination. And throw in some random letters (yes, I realize that's the building address but to your average drunken Cubs fan, they'r...

Worried about Swine Flu? Good luck remembering the website! By the way, how about the job those pig farmers did to recast the virus as H1N1?! Apparently, Joe Public actually thought that you could catch it by eating pork. Methinks my main man @saneel said it best with this tweet: "The 1 upside to swine flu is that now coughing immediately shuts-cha...