Developing a website takes the same amount of time whether you are building it on a good domain name (CoffeeHouses.com) or an average domain name (FreeCoffeeHouseDirectory.com). Likewise, the cost of developing a website is pretty much the same whether it is a good domain name or a poor domain name. For these reasons, I would prefer to only develop very good domain names rather than putzing around developing new registrations (like I did with DebtAssistanceClinic.com).
When you are building a website, there is absolutely no guarantee that your website will be profitable and make money. No matter how good the site looks and how high it ranks, you can’t guarantee it will earn your time and financial investment back. The more effort you put into link building, content writing, search engine optimization…etc, the greater financial reward you will reap. Doing all of these things takes a considerable amount of time, and as you know, time is money.
While it’s great if you built a website that makes $2/day with Adsense on a low quality domain name, it will be difficult to get someone to buy it for more than 2-4x annual revenue because there is considerable risk in this type of investment. Basically, after many hours of work (let’s say 5 full days) you have a website that may make $700/year. Personally, I think it’s hard to justify spending a ton of time build a great, money making website on a poor domain name.
I’ve noticed a number of developers “bashing” domain investors for parking their domain names rather than developing them. Many of these developers, designers and SEO experts talk about how they could make one of these parked domain names into a huge money making website, and the owner is stupid for parking. While I may agree that parking can be a poor solution in some cases (could cause Google de-listing for one), it is far easier to make money on a parked domain name than to try and build dozens of websites on a domain investor’s prime domain names (all without a guarantee of any incremental revenue).
To the people who think they can do far better developing a name than those who park, I challenge you to go out and make a strategic decision to find a good name and develop it. With your expert plan, why not go out and find an investor who would be willing to front you the money to implement your plan. There are also some fantastic financing options like Domain Capital that can help you pay for your name. With all respects, if you have a plan to develop a high value domain name into a money-printing website, but you don’t have the stones to put up your own money or finance it, maybe the domain parkers aren’t the stupid ones after all?
This is a bit tongue in cheek, as a few of my developer and SEO friends have recently jumped in and bought some great domain names to develop.
While you don’t need a great domain name for a great website, you will certainly make it much, much easier to make money with advertisers and achieve higher search engine rankings (again, if you owned a coffee house, would you rather be listed on CoffeeHouses.com or FreeCoffeeHouseDirectory.com?). Additionally, if you do wish to sell the domain and website, an investor will pay much more for the website with premium domain name.
Since one can only spend a certain amount of hours per day developing a website, its better to spend that time working on a website for a great domain name rather than just an average domain name.

One fairly simple development strategy that I am beginning to use involves building a website template and using that for all minisites. Instead of building a brand new web template for every site, save some time and money and use a very similar template. It doesn’t have to be fancy or flashy, but as long as there is room for content that can be viewed on a variety of browsers and screen sizes, room for Google Adsense banners, and room for other advertising banners from direct-to-advertiser sales (or affiliate relationships), you should be okay.
Personally, I wouldn’t recommend this for sites with a considerable amount of content or for high value domain names, as you probably want those to be more customized, but for your mini-sites that will have 5-10 pages each, I think one template should be sufficient. For those debating whether to use HTML, WordPress, or another type of tool, I am not the best person to make a recommendation. I think WordPress is easy, and I use Dreamweaver for HTML, which I learned on my own. Both are fairly straightforward and self explanatory – especially with a bit of background in HTML coding.
When it comes to the technical aspect of web development, my skill level started off at somewhere near a 1 on a scale of 10.   I am now probably around a 2.5, but I am still able to add pages to my WordPress and HTML sites easily. I’ve been told that I should use php to create my header, navigation and footer – which I probably should, but I’ve been too busy to learn. In the long run, I probably would save a ton of time by committing to a few hours now, but it’s hard to do that with so many things going on at the moment.
From experience, I can tell you that building a mini-site using strong SEO techniques will help increase traffic to a domain name/website. The more traffic that visits the site, usually the more revenue the site earns. I think if you put some time into development – but keep the time/financial commitment in line with your expectations for the site, you probably can’t go wrong. As I’ve always said, feel free to drop me a note with questions, and if I can’t answer them, I will try to put you in touch with someone who is more knowledgeable.