I wrote a little over a month ago about finding my first niche. As I said, it worked out for my for a while, but MySpace got big and snatched that market right out from under me. To be honest, it was time for me to move on anyway. My skills were getting better and I was ready to create real business solutions for real businesses. So I had to figure out what my next niche would be.

I realized that if I wanted to make money, I’d need to get clients that were making money. That seems somewhat obvious, but between new businesses, bands trying to make it, and non-profits, that might be harder than it sounds. I decided to go with something I could produce fairly quickly, and make look pretty good- brochure sites. These are websites that are strictly informative; little to no user interation. Generally my brochure sites had 4 or 5 pages: Home, About, a showcase page, Contact, and some other page that was specific to the business. Between $500-600 was my asking price.

This was a good niche for me at the time for a few reasons:

• It gave me the chance to hone my design skills a little. I realized that all my designs looked about the same, which allowed me to assess what I was doing and try new things.
• I didn’t need to advertise. I knew a lot people who owned small businesses, or knew people who knew small business owners. So I offered them a good, affordable website.
• I got to think about other aspects of web design, like my process, eliciting requirements from users, etc. and then go to refine them and make them better.

After a while, I did want to move on to bigger better things, and got to build my first real web app (for someone else) in 2006. But that is a story all in itself!

Tags: beginning, clients, niche, people, skills | Posted in Stories |