Error leads to confusion and poker

Lorain County officials folded a perfectly good hand when they let the domain name for the Lorain County Visitors Bureau's website expire. Now an Indonesian online poker website has taken over VisitLorainCounty.com. The county wouldn't have needed much of an ante to stay in the game, just $17.99 to keep the domain name. When the county failed to act, an apparent cybersquatter swooped in and bought it. County Commissioner Matt Lundy, a Democrat, said he'd warned county Administrator Tom Williams on Feb. 18 that the county's claim to the domain was about to expire, but nothing was done. For the price of a few cups of coffee, the county could have avoided this embarrassment. Buying back the domain name from its new owner would cost $1,100, Commissioner David Moore, a Republican, told our reporter Dave O'Brien. The name isn't worth the expense at this point, but someone seems to have realized the mistake and checked to see how much it would cost to fix. Still, Moore and Williams defended letting the domain lapse. Williams said the VisitLorainCounty.com website was last updated in 2018. He described it as hard to work on and navigate. He also said visits to the site had plummeted. Moore went a step further, describing the website as "an utter disaster for over three years" that had "no traffic." Lundy painted a different picture, saying the website got 57,000 visits in 2018 and 62,000 in 2019, although he acknowledged traffic was down 30 percent or 40 percent last year because of the pandemic. "It's not a fair assessment to say that it was a dinosaur or no one was visiting," Lundy said. "You keep the domain for a hand-off or smooth transition. … This is the time when the economy is opening up, not a time to hit a big roadblock." Exactly, and anyone contemplating a visit to the county will have a harder time learning about its attractions, hotels and restaurants because of this error in judgment. Sure, would-be visitors can check out the bureau's Facebook page, but the last post there was on March 17, 2020, so it's not much help either. And, as of Wednesday evening, the Facebook page still listed VisitLorainCounty.com as the bureau's website. (It appeared to have been removed by Thursday evening). Moore said the county planned to relaunch a redesigned website with a .gov extension rather than a .com one. That's fine, but the county doesn't yet have a new website or a new web address for Visit Lorain County, although the commissioners said those were in the works. Even if the bureau had a fully functional and updated website with a nifty .gov extension ready to go, though, it would have benefited if the old domain name had been kept and set to redirect visitors to the new site. That's exactly what the county Board of Elections did in 2019 when the state mandated that boards change to .us or .gov extensions. At the time, the board was using a .com extension. Elections Board Director Paul Adams told us the board chose a .us extension because it required less paperwork. Last year, the federal government told elections boards to switch to a .gov extension, which meant the county's board had to change its web address once again. Nonetheless, the board wisely prevented confusion by keeping its old domain active to redirect visitors to the new site through the presidential election. Adams also told us that several years ago the county let the elections board's domain lapse, but the error was discovered before anyone else snapped the domain up. After that, he said, the board took over maintenance of its domain. That was a smart play. As Kenny Rogers once observed, ""Every gambler knows/ That the secret to survivin'/ Is knowin' what to throw away/ And knowin' what to keep." The county threw away the wrong cards.