WaffleBox

I came across this site called DoshDosh, a blog geared towards making money online via blogging. The author made a post yesterday in reference to another post (blog niche choice) about how choosing a niche, hers/his in particular, means there is a ceiling or cap on the number of people who will visit the site. Of course, this is what a niche is after all, but it is a very blunt way of looking at it.

Collis from NorthXEast writes about how your choice of a blog niche affects your blog’s growth in the long run. He suggests that distinguishing your blog from others within a competitive niche is important for success.

I have been thinking of this for some time and I’ll just like to add that there’s some sort of a traffic ceiling for every niche you choose. - doshdosh

Niches are meant to place harsh filters on your blog/site/business/whatever
I never really put it so bluntly myself. I always thought of a niche as a way to define your worldview, get some clear understanding of your audience was. I just found it jarring that there is a perceived ceiling to a niche.

I think that it not so much a concrete or immovable ceiling as it is one that will raise slower than others, but the rate at which it raises, or its adoption rate, is a good thing.

The content doshdosh has to offer would be valuable to most any blogger, even ones who have absolutely no interest in making money from blogging simply because the site offers all sorts of tips about building readership, new startups and even software reviews. They way their niche is defined, as many niches are, is through their color scheme, tagline, titling of posts, subject matter of the majority of the posts, advertiser links, communities the site belongs to and so on.

I just feel that a niche is about building and concerning its own world view, but in terms of growth, the sky is the limit… It is the timing and patience that has the potential to kill it.

More is the new less.

I was one of the first to jump on the “less is more” (in terms of web app and website features) bandwagon, but I am ready to jump ship! Why is it that I am more drawn to, clutter effectively, over minimalist designs? Am I sick or bored with simple? Or maybe I am just bored with the sites that take a “one less feature” approach.

Maybe it’s interaction
I refuse to believe I feel this way simply because everything is cyclical simply for cyclicals sake. That we get bored or sick of things quickly. While I think there is some validity to this, I do not think that its 100% of the reasoning. I believe it is because of the direction the web in going in, or more accurately, the state it currently is in.

Communities. Niche communities. People are generally sick of all the social networks that pop up everyday, but I say bring them on. Social networks are become more about pleasing specific niches, helping people with common interests mingle and connect. Sure we could have stopped at MySpace or Facebook, but then we would not have sites like news.ycombinator.com (one of my first stops of the day). Hell, we could have stopped at HTML and Perl CGI! It has 99% of everything we need. We need more to satisfy out palettes.

More of what?
Ah! Glad you asked. It’s key to know what we need more of because simply adding more of everything, ahem Web 1.0, will kill your site - This is another reason why I think it is not for simple cyclical reasons that simple sites are boring me. 90’s websites were about cramming everything you could onto a website and it did not matter what it was. Buttons, dancing babies, spinning letters (yeah… Every letter in the title of my first website spun!), frames, webrings and so forth.

Adding more to define a site can have huge benefits. Take a look at Fred Wilson’s blog A VC. It is pretty jam packed with every widget available. But there is a clear purpose to this, framing his “world view”. For starters it lets you into what kind of person Fred is. He likes, nay, loves software. It is clearly his passion and seeing as he funds software startups, it is no surprise that he wants to test out every bit of software technology he can get his hands on. Lijit, Voki, Flickr, and MyBlogLog to name a few.

The way things are now, it comes down to communities, people being able to define and dictate the direction a website will take. I will probably add a follow up post that talks more about the importance of letting your users guide the direction of your website or blog.