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August 2, 2007, 04:06 PM ET
Masters of Their Domain
Virtually no one (besides The Chronicle, that is) refers to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by its full name. To students and alums, it’s just “Illinois.” The rest is superfluous.
Yet the institution’s Web site has always been located at uiuc.edu — a domain name honoring an acronym that never really caught on. Big deal, you say? To Illinois officials, it is.
The university has set out on a multiyear project that will replace its little-used domain name with the more elegant illinois.edu, The News-Gazette of Urbana reports. (The university already owned illinois.edu, but that Web address redirected visitors to the uiuc.edu site.) By doing so, campus officials say, the institution will correct a problem it created years and years ago — when colleges were more concerned about keeping domain names short than about reinforcing their brands.
Switching domains seems like an exhausting process: New e-mail addresses must be created, spam filters and security mechanisms must be duplicated, and so on. And students and professors might not be thrilled about typing in those four pesky extra letters just to visit the campus Web site. But officials at Illinois — and at Northwestern University, which made the move from nwu.edu to northwestern.edu about eight years ago — say the marketing rewards are well worth the procedural nuisances. —Brock Read
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