DNForum - Domain Sales, Domain Forum, Domain Appraisals, Domain Registrars - View Single Post

**theoretical** · 06-29-2009, 08:49 PM

quoted from my blog from just last week: http://www.utterdomain.com/2009/06/i...sometimes.html

Quote:

This post is about what I see WhyPark could do to improve it's usability and what issues I see it having going forward as an alternative to parking.

Stats - while it's great that it allows integration of any stat tracking service - like Google Analytics - the internal stats are really quite untrustworthy. What I mean is, no other parking company shows more vistors than you actually received, but WhyPark consistently shows more visitors than Google Analytics for the same site on the same day. WhyPark is so far off, that about the only conclusion I can come to is that it's tracking bot hits, which is really not accurate at all.
The default ad links can be a real pain - if you pay for the option to customize the ad serving, you can do whatever you want. But it would be nice to have a feature like Sedo for setting specific related key words as their random guesses are almost always wrong... either because they are duplicated or because they made them up out of thin air.
The content needs to be more geo targeted - Granted, some sites care more about this than others, but it would be incredibly helpful to filter at least by country if not by state where a country or state is actually discussed in the content. It's embarrassing having a site about Oregon Homes for sale talking about Florida foreclosures - or worse - the things to consider when purchasing a home in the UK.
The templates are flexible, but pretty meager in the creativity department. Sure, there are templates for a bunch of the major US Cities, but many of the images are stock photos of trees and close ups of buildings. Very few recognizable landmarks to be seen anywhere. And don't get me started on their rather "loose" interpretations of what goes in a category - last time I checked I didn't have any food in my "Family". WhyPark lists 50 pictures in the "Family" category, but only one of them is actually labeled family.. and it's of the back sides of two apparently young kids. I suppose that could make a family, but I'm not sure what site I would be comfortable putting that on... certainly not a family site. See there, you got me started!
Building multiple sites using a common "theme" is really a pain in the neck. I can't easily apply a subset of settings like just the css for example across multiple sites. There's not really a way to setup your own tokens either, which means creating up multiple variations of a single "theme" doesn't scale well at all. For example if I have 5 auto sites, I can setup a template, but none of the content/custom pages goes with it. I can copy and paste settings between sites and custom pages, but the interface doesn't make this very easy to do at all and there's really no import/export feature to speak of. If I just want to plug in the SiteName, I can do that without too much trouble, but I can't, for example, have my own token like the name of the city or the name of the product. And so each custom page must be.. well... custom built.
Custom Pages aren't very configurable - I'd like to see them be configurable as navigation/menu items instead of just having the option of posting them on the home page. You can set it up yourself that way (as you can see in the examples below), but it's a lot of manual setup to do it. The page title you use for the browser gets displayed as the header and there's nothing you can do about it - separate page and header text would be greatly appreciated. And you can't customize ads, images or links per page, which makes your site look like it was done by a 13 year old.

I do like WhyPark... they have a ways to go yet, but I think they are headed in the right direction.