Choosing the Right Niche

There are too many factors to discuss here when it comes to choosing the right niche. However, some things to bear in mind:

• You should always write about what you know, and what you find fascinating. This will help you to stay committed to running your website, and it will help you to create content that is truly able to provide real value.

• Choose a niche that has a very clear target audience. This will make marketing much easier moving forward.

• Choose a niche that is potentially profitable. Do people spend money on this? How much?

• Consider the competition. What have they gotten right? What can you do differently? How can you set yourself apart.

• Consider creating a new niche. By combining different niches, or honing in on one small facet of a larger niche, you can appeal to lots of people while be completely unique.

Suiting Your Design to the Niche

As mentioned, choosing a niche early on is important so that you can design your website to complement that subject matter. This will help you to communicate visually what you are all about, which in turn will determine whether or not people stick around who you want to keep there.

So how might your design be suited to a particular niche?

Well, there are several things to consider here. Here are just a couple of them:

Color Scheme: The color scheme of your website will automatically communicate a lot about your site. For instance, if your site is about ‘going green’ or other environmental concerns, then using greens and a generally clean design is a great way to communicate that fact and create a kind of association. Meanwhile, you might also use green for a ‘make money’ website.

If your site is about sci-fi or tech then blues, blacks, and silvers may be more appropriate. Thanks to science fiction films these are the colours we’ve come to associate with the future and science.

Similarly, if your site is about business, or promoting a B2B service, then you might want to consider using dark blues and whites. These are colors that feel more ‘professional’ and that will help make your site appear professional as a result.

At the other end of the spectrum are sites that are aimed at children – and in this case, you might want the site to use bright colors like reds and blues as children have been shown to respond better to primary colors.

Finally, if your site is about something in particular such as a character or a brand, then you should reflect those colors in your site design. A site about Superman for instance would almost certainly want to involve large quantities of red and blue.

Font: The font can also help to reflect your niche and this is something else to consider. For instance, if you have a site that’s about retro gaming then you might want to make use of a kind of pixelated system font. Likewise, if your site is about Victorian England you could use a ‘ye olde’ kind of font or one that looks like acrylic handwriting, whereas for a vampire site gothic text could work well.

Images: Of course, your images should reflect your niche, but that should also apply to buttons and switches. Try to think about the era you want your site to evoke, the mood, and the audience yet again. Backgrounds too are important to consider here, and you can either go straight forward and use images that are of or about your niche, or you can use images that evoke the topic – such as old stained paper as shown below for instance for a site about pirates and their treasure maps.