Sound familiar to anyone?

URL won't load, but an emailed link works fine?

[alflashino]

I'm far from an expert webmaster - but this one makes no sense to me, and I'm hoping someone else has experienced something similar.

Just launched a brand new website. DNS changes were put in place 3 days ago. It's up and running just fine from what I can tell.

But a couple people have called the client to say that they can't get the site to display. "Page not found". Client goes over address spelling with them, and nothing works. Then client emails them a link to the site, and then it loads fine.

How is an emailed link different from typing in address manually? (I thought no difference at all, which is why this makes no sense to me)

Any thoughts?

AL

[MatthewHSE]

First off, Welcome to Webmaster World!

I'm no expert either, but there are at least three things I can think of that this might be:

• Typing errors
  
• Visitor using www.domain.com when server is set up to only use domain.com, or vice-versa
  
• Visitor typing in www.domain.com, but some server configuration is wrong/different and requires www.domain.com/index.html (or similar).

If you're sure it's not typing errors, think along the lines of the last two possibilities. Most servers are setup so that those kinds of issues wouldn't be a problem, but you never can tell.

Matthew pulls his neck back in before it gets chopped off by someone who really knows what they're talking about! ;)

[kaled]

I'd guess a caching issue. In Opera, F5 forces a proper refresh (not sure about Firefox) but in IE you need to use ctrl-F5, or possibly shift-F5 (can't remember which).

Kaled.