WhyPark.com

[SDX]

Hi guys,

I've been using WhyPark.com for some time now and I must say I'm rather pleased, especially after they inherited Parked.com's ad feed now.
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What are some of your experiences?

Thanks!

 

[theoretical]

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

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.

 

[SDX]

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



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

Thanks for the insight theoretical...I agree with many of your points.
Hopefully being part of the Parked.com family now, they can really start moving in the right direction faster as the competition is also evolving in this ever changing "parking industry".

 

[David G]

I likw Whypark a lot. A probem is the templates sometimes are not that diverse or targeted. For example, medical is very limited with no pictures of doctors, and family activities are real thin such as swimming and swimming pools where there are none. Pictures of people are not common at all for some odd reason. However, overall I am well satisfied with the sites and the content. The ability to use newsletters and your own RSS feed in the sites is a big plus.

 

[SDX]

I likw Whypark a lot. A probem is the templates sometimes are not that diverse or targeted. For example, medical is very limited with no pictures of doctors, and family activities are real thin such as swimming and swimming pools where there are none. Pictures of people are not common at all for some odd reason. However, overall I am well satisfied with the sites and the content. The ability to use newsletters and your own RSS feed in the sites is a big plus.

Do you have the basic account?
The premium templates with new images are rather nice actually.
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They also just added the ability to sort stats now, which is a HUGE plus!

 

[Focus]

anyone have examples of their sites with whypark?

 

[David G]

I have the $25 month acct but still difficulty finding good templates for some categories such as health and families for example.

p.s. to Focus, example site is in my sig below...

 

[Focus]

Using whypark have you seen an increase in ctr% or decrease? Have you seen a signifigant increase in activity to normally lower traffic names from search engine visitors? How well are your sites being indexed in search results?

trader, your site looks great btw.

 

[SDX]

anyone have examples of their sites with whypark?

LOTS!
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How ya like my e.MD for starters?

Using whypark have you seen an increase in ctr% or decrease? Have you seen a signifigant increase in activity to normally lower traffic names from search engine visitors? How well are your sites being indexed in search results?

trader, your site looks great btw.

I've moved a lot of names from Parked to WhyPark now (staying in the same "family" ).
This was recently so I'm still waiting to report any significant increases in traffic though.

 

[Gerry]

How ya like my e.MD for starters?

Schweet! Very nice colors and balance with the design/layout.

 

[Focus]

so does e.MD get any traffic or make any money?

 

[SDX]

Schweet! Very nice colors and balance with the design/layout.

Thanks...Kelly helped me on this one...I love the fact that you can talk to her live also

I have the $25 month acct but still difficulty finding good templates for some categories such as health and families for example.

p.s. to Focus, example site is in my sig below...

Is this a "Premium template" trader?

so does e.MD get any traffic or make any money?

Nothing to write home about yet, but I can say that revenue and traffic IS steadily increasing. k:

 

[Donny Simonton]

We are adding a bunch of new images to WhyPark every week. If you have any particular requests send them to Kelly, she might be able to get them worked on.

Donny

 

[wolfis.com]

i use whypark for about 6 weeks and have not seen any increase in traffic yet - in fact the past 2 days its the lowest traffic count for at least 4 weeks and close to no pageviews anymore - something changed, but not sure what - when i added domains in may i saw on some domains ( not all ) what i assumed boots or robots that index and spider approx. half of the domains - the domains i added lately - nothing !

my second problem is and i see that with every page i look at that link ( develop your domains ) - i do understand this on a free account ( like mine ) but on the paid account - in no way would i EVER pay $ 25 a month or more and have links on my website i get nothing out of ,but advertise someone elses business.


the functions on the free account are very limited , however i fail to see much difference to paid accounts to make me think - oh , well i pay.

with limited functions i mean change the layout or change the size of the links ( develop your website seams to be overkill on most templates.

by default the system sets up the domain without the .com - which shows visitors not even the domain name - really silly - look elswhere on the 120 million websites on the world wide web - 99% have the domain name on top ( with the dot com ) so that people know which website they are visiting .
yes i could change it - but with 1000's of domains , i guess it will take some time and just addtional work that didn't need to be.

i am missing date and add to favorites.

many times the system chooses an image that has nothing to do with the domain name
and there is no way to change it example : walnutsideboards.com i guess the system does not know this is a piece of furniture.

there is a lot more i would try to change ( like the stats are very limited and close to useless and only once a day )

i have to see anything on the traffic numbers that make me think its improving first.

i also would like to know if the paid accounts have better traffic improvements - i have never heart anybody come out and post information about this - DOES parking ( or using)
whypark IMPROVE traffic ??

if yes - which account - what timeframe - what did you do to improve it ?

these are the real questions we need to know in order to make it work !!

ANYONE ?

 

[theoretical]

See http://CorvallisInsurance.com - do a search in google for "Corvallis Insurance" - I just set this up less than two weeks ago. I was in the top 3 at google within a couple of days. I've made some in revenue and traffic isn't bad but I need to really flesh out the site with insurance quote affiliate links. I just haven't gotten back to it after having gotten the affiliates through CJ. I also want to create custom logos for my sites which will also help with conversions as it won't look like it's a glorified park page.

Note: the "develop your sites" link is actually *your* whypark affiliate link so you do get something for having that there if you want, but turning it off is easy, too. No, a developed site doesn't really increase your ctr but it does increase traffic over time if you do the things necessary to rank like having unique content, good page titles and doing link building... so the theory is that there is a net win, but you have to do more than just click a couple of buttons and hope that you make more money. That's not how life or domaining works.

 

[wolfis.com]

i would like to see ANYBODY with LONGTERM RESULTS !

 

[theoretical]

i would like to see ANYBODY with LONGTERM RESULTS !

Their is always the famous case study of airline rewards: http://www.whypark.com/success-stories.htm

but why do you question my freshly registered name ranking in the top 3 of google for my key word? I've even seen two of my pages show up in the top 10 results at google. What kind of long term results are you looking for?

edit: my http://CedarFallsInsurance.com is also ranking now in the top 10 at google for Cedar Falls Insurance.

 

[Donny Simonton]

wolfis - Trust me we wouldn't have purchased them if there were not long term results.

Donny

 

[SDX]

wolfis - Trust me we wouldn't have purchased them if there were not long term results.

Donny

If Donny says so, then it MUST be true! :smilewinkgrin:
...
Just put this one up: BestTravelDeals

 

[wolfis.com]

well don't want to be a party pooper - so here is one i just started :

http://tricks.info