I am convinced a good way for individual writers and small business owners to grow their income online involves building many small websites on keyword domains. That said, a key to success is efficiently managing the process. You have to register the domains and build a site on each. Each will have unique content, but they may share their look and feel.
We have tried several approaches to meeting these requirements and this post discusses three of them.
WordPress is free software which is rapidly becoming the basis for millions of small (and large) websites. It started as blogging software but these days is more accurately thought of as a general purpose content management system. This site, Selling Stuff, is a WordPress site. The biggest problem we have with WordPress is the rate of change in the software with the need for frequent updates. It's not a problem updating one or two sites. If you have a few hundred it's a problem.
XSitePro is another system for rapidly building out a lot of websites. It to was designed for writers who are not technically skilled. It was designed to build more conventional websites and does not emphasize the blogging features of WordPress. The system provides "wizards" that allow users to add common functions to their sites when they are ready for them. For example, email marketing has become popular, and there is a wizard available to make it easy to set up an email marketing system using any of the big companies that provide these services. This link will take you to more articles we have written about XSitePro's technical details.
Custom code is great. You get exactly what you want. It is also slow to arrive, expensive, and it is terribly hard to know what you want until you have experience. Thus the development process becomes one of feedback from user to developer to user etc. It may take a lot of iterations to get it right. Time and budget may not allow the number of iterations necessary to craft a truly awesome product. Thus the stories of software system failures we read about so frequently.
So, Which is best? It depends.
WordPress retains the blog "feel" of it's roots. If you plan to write a series of articles about a subject near and dear to you, it would be the tool of choice. The farther you get away from that ideal the less likely it is to be a good 'fit" with what you want to do and the more likely you are to need help extending it.
XSitePro has, I think, been heavily impacted by WordPress. The ways it differs from WordPress is not obvious to the technically illiterate and WordPress has gotten all the attention. WordPress has also become the tool of choice for all the internet marketers promoting their "Get Rich Quick" systems. The $197 cost of the system is no doubt a final factor tipping the undecided towards WordPress.
I asked around on some forums I read and the best use of XSitePro I found was a domainer (Person who earns their income from buying & selling domain names). These people tend to have hundreds, or even thousands of names and frequently have no website development skills. With XSitePro they can publish a simple site for each of their domains that explains why it might be valuable, how it could best be used, and gives their contact information. This will greatly increase their chances of finding a buyer willing to pay a good price for the domain without taking a lot of their time.
Custom Code is best left to those with large budgets and/or special circumstances. In our case we had existing sites created with other methods and were attempting to solve some of the problems we saw with them. For example, custom code only changes when you want it do. There is no need to try and keep up with some other developers schedule. I would only recommend it to people who have thoroughly explored the potential of simpler systems.
