As of 11nov, 1603 hrs, the errors I have brought to light (and elaborated below in this post) about 8 days ago seem to have been fixed.
As you may have read this on the front page of today’s Straits Times, SPH has launched a loyalty rewards program. For direct SPH subscribers, you can sign up for an account at http://www.sphrewards.com.sg. However, you need to be careful when entering the URL to get your freebies, vouchers, etc. Don’t forget the ‘www’ and ‘.sg’. And here’s why.
Firstly, you will have to type the ‘www’ for the website to display correctly. Type sphrewards.com.sg without the ‘www’, you will be directed to a test page.
Screen shot | BIG_MOUSE | SPH Rewards (test page)
Another problem I noticed is that if you were to leave out the ‘.sg’ at the end of www.sphrewards.com.sg, you will be directed to a totally unrelated website. This is scary, as this page that you are redirected to also has a sign-up page. I won’t be surprised if people may overlook the redirected URL (salesforce, and not SPH rewards) and give their personal details (and lose their privacy of course) to a random database. Why did SPH not check for similar domain names before registering http://www.sphrewards.com.sg?
Screen shot | BIG_MOUSE | SPH Rewards (redirect)
Something to learn from this issue – choose your unique domain names carefully. Do it wrong, and your target audience will not not be able reach your website efficiently. Looking at google search results, SPH’s Rewards website is 6th on the list (which is bad).
Screen shot | BIG_MOUSE | Google Search results for 'sphrewards'
