The ‘DIY Domain Parking’ Template is Born

I’ve been spending a few days working on the first prototype of my ‘DIY Domain Parking’ template.

The driver behind this is to try and claw back some revenue from my parking administrator who seem to have a very loose interpretation of ‘sharing’ this with me.

I’ve set myself the following criteria for building my parking template..

• Use a WordPress theme which is not charged on a per site basis i.e. no matter how many parked sites I create the price for the theme will be a one-off amount.

• The process of setting up a site, installing WordPress and adding the content, picture and affiliate links or ads must take no longer than 10 minutes to carry out.

• Reusable code must be used i.e. save time by being able to copy and paste most aspects of the template for quick set up.

• Must be a mobile responsive theme or one that can have a child theme added with ease in future to allow mobile responsiveness.

I’m pleased to say that I met all of these criteria and I’ll now break these down for you and provide further information on each point.

The WordPress Theme

Having tested and considered a few different WordPress templates I decided to go with the Genesis Theme by StudioPress. The reasons for this are as follows –

1. Simple, uncluttered design and layout
2. Fast page load times
3. Easy to use and simple to configure the required changes
4. Single licence fee allows for use on an unlimited amount of sites

Setup Process

Having set up a few of these I have now got the process down to between 8-9 minutes per site. This beats my 10 minute target so I’m happy with that. You might think it’s a lot of hassle to set up a parking page for each of your domains but I really think it’s worth it because once done you will get ALL of the revenue earned from the page FOREVER.

You might be wondering how it’s possible to set up a site on your host, install WordPress and then set up the content, optimization, image and affiliate links / ads within 10 minutes? This is do-able because I have written some HTML code which I paste into a WordPress page and then just customize the text within it according to the site I am putting up. This means I don’t have to fiddle around with widgets, headers and ad placement as all of the required parts of my page are held within this one block of HTML. That’s the secret to how fast it is to put these up…the old copy and paste technique! The Genesis Theme is really intuitive, making it dead easy to set up sites in this way.

Reusable Code

By setting up a standard template to hold all content, affiliate links and any ad blocks it is possible to use pretty much the same code on all sites. This is a great time saver and means there is no time spent creating or fiddling around with different elements, other than quickly knocking up an Amazon carousel for the top right of the page which can be done in under a minute.

Mobile Responsiveness

OK, so while the Genesis Theme works really well out of the box and looks good on a mobile device it’s not a mobile responsive theme as such. However, the beauty of this theme is that I can add a child theme that is mobile responsive or better still I can just create a separate piece of HTML code to go with a mobile responsive version of this parking page (which I will do and this will feature in a future post). Also, testing standard vs mobile friendly parking pages will be an interesting experiment and one which I’d like to undertake at some point soon.

So.. here is a screenshot of the first version of my ‘DIY Domain Parking‘ template which is based on a fictional site called ‘Storage Shelving’. I’ll run through the basics of it’s structure below.

As I’ve said already, everything displayed on the page is contained within one block of HTML which is simply pasted into a WordPress page. The aim was to keep it fairly uncluttered as well as making it quick to put up.

There is a header section which contains the title and an Amazon product carousel unit. This is followed by some content, an image product affiliate link and an ad unit on the right hand side of that. Finally, there is a link to contact me in case anyone wants to advertise on the domain or make an offer to buy it.

By my reckoning this takes care of all aspects of parking which my administrator was handling for me previously, only now I get to keep 100% of the revenue.. nice!

I hope this post has been of interest to you and given you some food for thought if you’ve found yourself at the mercy of your parking administrator like I did.