What Is Development?

Speaking with various domainers about developing their domain names and it's incredible how many different views their are on what constitutes "development".

To me, I would define it as building a web site with a view to performing a business function - for example, promoting goods or services with the aim of selling something - whether it be your own products or services, or those of a third party.

Others might argue that simply posting up a few pages of articles with some Google Adsense and maybe the occasional affiliate program link would suffice.

To many, especially those with premium names, development might only mean building out fully functional sites, destined to become the market leader in their niche.

It doesn't really matter in my opinion. The important thing is to do something with a domain.

Not being a great fan or advocate of parking, I've always tried to develop those names that grab my attention at a particualr time.

This week for example, I purchased SportsTelegraph.com in the after market and therefore felt compelled to do something with it.

It's not one of my core names, but I paid a few hundred dollars for it and so it has to be developed. There's little point in leaving it parked, or worse, pointing to nothing at all.

The name has to pay it's keep until I decide what to do with it.

I know nothing about sport and have little interest in the subject. I bought the name because it seemed like a nice name - I can't explain why exactly, it's just one of those that cropped up one day.

So what to do with it?

Someone with no knowledge cannot suddenly create some kind of sporting portal and I didn't really want to start hiring writers to create content.

In the end, I took the line of least resistance and knocked out something in XSitePro2 that took all of 20 minutes.

All the site contains at present is a few Google Adsense ads, some RSS feeds from various sporting publications and one or two product links from ClickBank.

I've not written any content at all, but may add some third party articles on specific sports at some stage.

Registering the sitemap with Google helps with SEO and will at least get the site listed in their index and now I can pretty much sit back and concentrate on my real income streams.

No doubt some day, somebody will come along and make an offer for the domain. If it's a good enough offer, maybe I'll sell it.

The point is that I haven't just bought a name and forgotten about it until renewal time. By doing something, it creates the impression that the name is in use. That means that some value is added should I ever come to sell it, simply because it won't look like a dormant name.

Is it development? Not by my definition, but it helps.