Reclaiming an old domain: quickweb.com

Season 6 of the Startup podcast debuted this morning. The first episode tells the story of Rick Schwartz who earned the title of “Domain King” by building a million dollar portfolio of dot com domains. Listening to the story reminded me of a nice domain I bought years ago and still own: quickweb.com

Back in the early 2000’s, I coded my own content management system which I called QuickWeb. It featured a WYSIWYG page editor, and I integrated it with early versions of WordPress to add a blog. If you had hired me as your web developer around 2004/5, I would have built your site using QuickWeb.

As I started hosting more and more clients with QuickWeb, it made sense to purchase quickweb.com. I recall spending somewhere north of $2,600 for it. Then I used it as the entrance to my QuickWeb SaaS portal.

In the years since, I’ve moved on to using WordPress as my CMS of choice. Meanwhile, I’ve left my domain, quickweb.com, mostly unused. But today’s episode of Startup gave me an idea to see how often random visitors might be looking for a “quick website”. What’s more, those types of visitors might actually click on affiliate links and purchase services. So, this morning I completed the following steps:

Searched the web for website building services that offer affiliate programs.

Shopify offers a nice affiliate program, so I applied and was accepted.

I setup a simple one page site at quickweb.com (i.e. build your ecommerce website quickly).

Lastly, I added Google Analytics to keep an eye on things.

I’m really not expecting anything to come of this, but I’ll keep you guys posted if anything interesting happens. As time allows, I may add additional affiliate links and information on how to quickly build a website. Who knows, I may work the site into an actual resource for persons who are new to the web.