I happened to check out NameBee this morning in between projects. As mentioned in the past, I get my domain news from select trusted feeds on Domaining.com and check out NameBee for all the rest.

While browsing NameBee. I happened to click on a blog I don’t read very often. It was a long post about dot tel that I was skimming. until I got to the juicy part.

“If you are domainer who can’t see beyond domain parking, then you will not get .Tel. I saw this same sort of ignorance with domain development, especially with minisites. One person in preaching the gospel of minisites went as far as to build a web page (or sort of) about a non-existent type of fish, just to “prove” that their “expert” opinion on minisite development was right. Later I heard him on web radio admitting, “development is hardwork”. Perhaps I heard a janitor speaking. Never mind.”

I assume this blogger is talking about me since I’ve been on the radio a few times, tested mini sites, talk about mini sites and development on my blog, and I spent a day building a site about a type of shark (not fish). I started writing the info below in the comment section on his blog, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on a comment post that wouldn’t be read by many people. It also seems like a good time to provide an update on my experiment:

1) ChainCatshark.com is the mini site I spent a day developing.
2) The domain was newly registered when I created a small site on it from scratch in November of 2008
3) Since launch (not including the three days during or after the time I posted), here are the statistics:

• 550 unique visitors
• 1,600 pageviews
• 2:33 time on site (average per visit)
• 75% of traffic from search engines (129 keyword phrases in Google alone)
• Earned much more than the cost of the domain + my time

In response to the blogger, I do think mini-site development is easy and it’s even easier when you contract with a mini site development service. It took me a few hours to build ChainCatshark.com, and I will never ever even have to look at the site again. It will continue to make a little bit of money and grow (as it has for the last 4 months). If it shut down today, I will have made my money back and a profit. I’ve also sold two mini sites, which became profitable due to the revenue and traffic from the mini site.

The downsides are that it took time to do the research on a topic in which I have no interest, I don’t really enjoy the actual technical part of development and coding, and I can still make more money today on other domain related projects (ie buying and selling great domain names as I’ve been doing for 5 years) than developing a series of mini sites on domain names that aren’t worth much as standalone domain names. It makes much more sense to build revenue generating websites on valuable domain names than on average or crappy domain names (unless the crappy domain name happens to be VC backed or have a unique concept/idea not found elsewhere).

I started off as a domain investor owning and selling top premium domain names, but a year and a half ago, I decided to start developing for the day that domain sales decreased and I’d need another revenue stream. Looking back on things, that is probably the most important decision, as I now own revenue generating businesses in addition to having strong domain assets.

Actual development projects are more difficult than mini sites that are fairly mundane but time consuming. I am talking about developing Burbank.com and Lowell.com. These two sites get decent traffic now (each at hundreds of visitors per day) but they do take a lot of work researching various topics and building all of the pages by hand – without a content management system. I maintain them on my own. I do the marketing on my own. I do the news writing. I do everything – and yes it’s hard to do it all.

In addition to development, I still manage my domain business (sales and acquisitions like Torah.com and Newburyport.com), I write this blog every day, and I quietly do corporate domain consulting gigs as well. My points about development and mini site development are above, throughout my blog, and archived in blog interviews and radio interviews. For now, it’s time to get back to work.

I have to say that the best thing I ever did for myself in terms of development was to learn basic HTML. I didn’t sign up for an expensive course or buy a bunch of books. I did it all with the help of Ebay.

When I was selling domain names on Ebay a few years ago, they began to offer sellers the option to customize their listings with HTML. You could either use the visual effects, where you would highlight the text and push buttons (bold, italics, colors, indent…etc) to make changes, or if you were daring, you could open up the actual HTML sheet. I haven’t been a seller in a long time, so I don’t know what it’s like now, but I would imagine it’s similar. This is also similar to the admin panel on WordPress.

Instead of simply using the “cheating” visual method, I also checked out the HTML and got a grasp for using HTML, which is a universal development language. I know what varies tags mean (like <b>bold</b> for example). Knowing basic HTML from my Ebay days a few years ago, I am now been able to manipulate and edit design code provided by my developers and designers. Each time I do this, I am able to learn new things and grow my knowledgebase.

I have never been entirely comfortable using HTML, and I would never call myself an expert, but I am confident enough to make changes and edits, and as a result, I am less reliant on developers for small changes. I can make edits on my sites much more quickly and for a lot less money. Whether I use full websites or mini-sites, my HTML knowledge is immensely helpful.

So, when you have a chance, learn basic HTML and you will be much better for it. Incidentally, I have absolutely no computer science or technology background at all, so this is all foreign to me – so that’s no excuse!

Here’s a simple web development tip that foolishly I didn’t do completely until today.   Using Google Analytics, find all of your site’s 404 errors. Locate the internal errors by seeing which internal pages sent the error traffic, open the pages up, and search for broken links.

It is also critical that you find external links that are going to a 404 page within your site. Perhaps the content moved, was removed, or the other webmaster made an error with his link to your site.   If it’s the later, perhaps you want to email or call the other webmaster and ask nicely for the link to change.   I find that calling is a better way to connect, although many people seem to be reluctant to pick up the phone.

If you find that the link is to a page that was moved or removed, you should redirect the link in your website’s htaccess file to a relevant page within your site – or to the page that moved.   It can be a pain to find the exact link that was used because Google only shows the referring website, however, you can do a site search on Google (ie search site:xyzreferrer.com yoursite.com) in Google, and you will probably find where your link originates. Instead of taking the chance that the other webmaster will remove his link, it’s probably better just to redirect it to a relevant page.

After doing this with one of my sites a couple days ago, error traffic is way down. This helps to reduce the bounce rate, which should help with Google rankings.