Barclays has found a home now at Home.Barclays, back in May they said they would be transitioning away from the .com and the .co.uk. They said they would be adding a layer of security for customers and clients by allowing only Barclays and Barclaycard to set up websites ending in .barclays and .barclaycard.
So now Barclays has the .com redirecting to Home.Barclays but not the .co.uk, that domain still stands alone and does not redirect. The one thing I think all these brands need to do is have continuity. On the hit HBO show Silicon Valley, a few people I know mentioned that they saw www.hooli.xyz, so that told them it was a domain name. I asked my one friend, “What if you just saw Hooli.xyz ?” He said he would have thought they forgot the .com.
So now back to Barclays, www.barclays does not propagate, I think at a minimum all brands should at least redirect the www to home or site or whatever they are going to use as the main gateway to their branded extension. The consumer who could care less about new gtlds, at least knows WWW, so I can imagine people typing in www.barclays must have been lost. Of course the .com redirects for now and it should for as long as there is a Barclays.
TLDoperator.help is conducting two webinars tomorrow, I hope they bring up the point of continuity when it comes to using these new branded tlds.