Developing a domain has many benefits and I have explained why domainers need to become domainer developers previously.
The drive to develop is a powerful one. Developed domains will always earn more, compared with simple domain parking, and even a domain that does not receive parking revenue may be able to pay for itself many times over with only a modest amount of development. Even mini sites consisting of up to 20 pages can be set up using free templates and can pay for themselves quickly.
The problem for many domainers is that they would like to develop some or all of the domains in their portfolio – but they are not sure how to do so. They have heard of free templates, Wordpress and so on but don’t always know exactly what the available choices are.
For those domainers with limited development skills, free template driven sites or Wordpress driven sites will be sufficient in a majority of cases. By contrast, Joomla and Drupal allow the development of more sophisticated websites with advanced functions such as forums ecommerce and so on.
Domainers have avoided development for a number of reasons.
Many people became domainers, lured by the dream of living off domain name parking revenue alone for the rest of their life like industry leaders, Frank, Rick and Sahar. The days when you could buy these ‘traffic domain names’ cheaply are long gone and the money is now in a.) development of sites a market niche or become leading ‘authority websites’ or b.) through the development of a mini sites (of no more than 5 – 10 pages, or less) on each domain.
Many domainers are not web developers and one way round this is to get someone else to do the work. Domainers with sufficient funds to contract out the development process to others may never have to worry too much about whats going on ‘under the hood’. However, web site building knowledge and skills are still important simply to understand what you need and to convey that to your developer.
I also think that if you understand what is involved in building different types of website you understand more about the market for that domain name and the potential for that domain name.
The good news is that you don’t have to be able to hand code your website from start to finish. There are lots of packages out there that do the hard work for you. And best of all – they are mostly free.
Free / low cost templates make development straight forward. Packages like Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal allow complex sites to be developed fairly quickly. They do take time to learn, however, but they make developing multiple sites straightforward and are well worth the effort.
In Part 2 we look at the development options in a little more detail.