After a promising start, AEIOU.com closed down from offering website design and development services to domain name owners and other customers looking for mini-sites.

In a post from his blog, AEIOU founder Rick Latona says that “There’s No Money in Web Design. AEIOU is getting out of the outsourcing business“:

We were the first company to sell mini-sites so we might as well be the first company to stop selling them.

The reality is there is no money in web design. It’s hard. The customers are hard to please. The margins are slim and frankly, there are bigger fish to fry.

Others would disagree with this statement, as they continue to provide web design services profitably.

Looking deeper into the post, it appears that in comparison to his company’s booming auction and brokerage businesses, there’s not much point in providing low budget mini web site development.

Fair enough.

The domain name industry is buzzing with the phrase ‘domain development‘ as frantic domain name owners rush to develop their premium domains into useful websites.

Domain Parking

In the domain name aftermarket, professional domain name investors would buy top grade domain names, predominantly in the dot com (.com) extention and place a simple one page website on the domain which is full of related advertisting links.

When a user comes to the domain name, they will see the single page of ads and once they click on one of the paid advertisements, the domain owner will receive advertising revenue. This process is known as domain parking.

Parking Limitations

Although domain parking is a cheap and easy way to monetize a domain name which generates traffic, there are an inceasing number of reasons why domain owners are scrambling to develop their domain names into websites as an alternative to parking.

• Internet Advertisers can now opt out of having their ads shown on domain parking pages
• Domain parking advertising rates are falling due to advertiser opt-outs and a general slowdown in internet ad rates
• Domain parking traffic is decreasing as search engines and internet browsers introduce features that lower direct navigation traffic
• Domain parking does not generate additional search traffic from getting more pages indexed in the search engines

The Need for Domain Development

With these developments, professional domain name owners (also known as domainers) are exploring the range of products and services available for web development.

There are many services offering custom website design and packaged mini sites which cost a couple of hundred dollars, but a large majority of domainers will be searching for solutions to build free websites on their domains.

Although custom development may have a lot of advantages, for domainers who own thousands of domains, it may not be financially feasible if you consider that to develop 1,000 domains at a cost of US$200, would require an investment of US$200,000 to build sites on all 1,000 domains.

Free Websites

The choices for using free online services and publishing platforms to build websites has improved a lot over the last few years.

Before paying for custom developed sites, domainers with a large domain portfolio may want to consider the available solutions for free websites.