No, nothing’s wrong with my scanner or your monitor. The world really was that blue back in March 1997 when this Buick ad appeared.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that blue in those days, but someone in the GM Advertising department was apparently having fun with different pre-Instagram camera filters for this two-page montage for the Park Avenue.

In the picture on the bottom right, the one with the proud Buick owner looking lovingly back on his land yacht, there’s a bunch of tiny print which includes a reference to http://www.parkavenue.buick.com.

That’s not the most succinct URL in the world, but I always think subdomains like this tend to rattle off the tongue a little easier than “dot-com-slash-whatever.” This was also in the early days of the web, so we’ll forgive the use of the www. ahead of the subdomain. It doesn’t typically need to be there as most modern browsers can handle the subdomain without issue.

In fact, not even a year later, a new ad for the Park Avenue appeared in a January 1998 magazine (above). For this ad, they dropped the www and went with the more standard http://parkavenue.buick.com.

These days, the Park Avenue is gone from the Buick lineup. That makes subdomains like this particularly tricky as someone at Buick needs to decide where to take web viewers who try to call up the old site. Do they go to the LaCrosse? Do they go to the main Buick page? Do they preserve a heritage page in honor of a model that is no longer around? There are many options.

And in the end, it looks like Buick has deleted the subdomain:

As of this writing (June 21, 2020), the page gives an error. I don’t know the exact choices that were made at Buick, but I suspect during some site migration or rebuild, a decision was made to drop the subdomain as it was probably deemed unnecessary.

Too bad. I’m sorry that the first post on this site is for a failed domain, but such is the nature of old car websites — many are just tossed aside as brands and models evolve.