Niche Web Design

Posted by Jeff on March 23, 2005 at 9:15 am.

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..ok, This has been something continually on my mind, but I haven’t voiced until now. It would seem that the web design/development market is getting more and more specific. For example, http://www.churchwebworks.com/site/prices.php is a web development company that has focused it’s entire product/design offering around building web sites for churches. Over time, I have also been exposed to similar companies for other industries/organization types’ as well (E.g. “We specialize in sites relating to…”Medical, Education, etc…) I don’t know how to feel about it, and while I understand the business value of offering an ‘expertise’ in a particular field, from a design standpoint I think I would find it boring and redundant to continually perform the same service over and over. Part of me however, would like to find that one remaining niche..like, ‘I specialize in building web sites for dogs’.

With this in mind, what other industries do you think could benifit from these types of ‘web products’? (Translation: give me a good idea so I can start one jk) But seriously, I am curious to know if there are any left, and if there are, perhaps moving in that direction is an option, after all…if it’s designed ‘right’, offering ‘Good Design’ is never really boring now is it?

…any, that’s my rant for the day. Hope you enjoy it.

-j

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9 Comments ( RSS comment feed | TrackBack URI ) »

Comment posted by Don on March 23, 2005 at 10:29 am
Rating: +1 votes
I specialize in designing sites for left handed, lesbian, eskimo, midget, albinos. Business is great and I don’t mind continually designing pages featuring the latest Susan Vega album and various winter wear. I would look into the blue nosed, webbed footed, black stripped, yellow tailed booby (they’re birds) market. I hear it’s lucrative.

Comment posted by Chris on March 23, 2005 at 11:36 am
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I was thinking about selling web sites to beluga whales. I hear they are friendly AND smart!

Comment posted by Chris on March 23, 2005 at 11:42 am
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Jeff you should try outsourcing. I hear there are a lot of companies in India looking to outsource design work to America.

Comment posted by Tommy Chapin on March 23, 2005 at 11:43 am
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For some odd reason, I have a mental image of Jesus driving the merchants out of the temple with a whip because they were capitalizing on temple-goers by selling “niche” products like candles and sacrifices…

Comment posted by Chris on March 23, 2005 at 11:49 am
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I like this line on that site: “If you are a member of a denomination, a district, conference, synod or diocese you may qualify for significant savings.”

I should have a coupon on Tornado that says: If you are human, bald, and have two eyes you may qualify for a special discount. Additional significant discounts may apply if you reside on planet earth and were born before 2005.

Comment posted by Tommy Chapin on March 23, 2005 at 11:49 am
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But seriously, though… I understand the whole niche market thing. Sometimes as a web designer it just happens without you even trying. For instance, here in Texas, there are a lot of resorts and marinas around Lake Texoma. One of the first web sites we did was for Tanglewood Resort. And suddenly all their competing marinas wanted a web site, too! So they came to us (or we went to them), and played off of that. Now almost all of them have web sites, and for a while it looked like we only specialized in marinas and what not. We could have taken it even further by making “marina templates” and selling them to Marinas around the states, but we decided not to. Instead, we jump from one niche market to the other, re-using modules as much as possible while still creating custom designs…

Comment posted by Tommy Chapin on March 23, 2005 at 11:56 am
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Non-profit templates, community portals, real estate companies, car dealerships, boat sales and rentals, baseball teams (scoring and team listings), livestock and animal listings (everything from horses to dogs for sale), doctor’s offices, lawyers, news agencies, classifieds, generic e-commerce storefronts, member based organizations… you name it, we’ll capitalize on it.

Comment posted by Chris on March 23, 2005 at 12:00 pm
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w w w . d e a l e r i m p a c t . c o m (just type it in folks)… We’ve worked with them and while I can’t say anything about their business practices *cough* they do have a cool business model and get a ton of business from car dealerships.