Thinking outside the Box
Posted on March 3, 2011 at 7:24 am by Vincent Doyle
It’s strange how people can look at the same thing that they see everyday and look right past the obvious. Take baby clothes for example. If you have a baby in your house you can look at the same piece of cute baby clothes stuffed inside of your designer diaper bags and look right past an obvious defect in the garment. It might actually be something that will stand out to someone else, but you might not even see it.
It’s a lot like trying to find a niche for a web based business. You can look at something so long that you fail to see the obvious flaw or defect in the site.
Using our baby clothes scenario again for a second let’s say we are looking through one of your designer diaper bags for some cute baby clothes that you know is in there. If someone were to put another piece in there that you had never seen it would cause you to stop and look at that item for some time.
It’s the same thing that retail stores use. They find a specific niche that works for them and they exploit that niche. However they don’t want people to get too comfortable because then they might get complacent and walk past other opportunities of things that would be a good buy for them. Therefore the store has to switch things around inside so that things are in different locations. That makes the customer have to pay attention as they shop and when they pay attention they notice things and generally buy more items. It’s the same niche, just in a different location so things look new and fresh.
It is no different when you are talking about the World Wide Web and designing. In fact, it is often more important there because you can get so many more customers in a short span of time and the same visitor can frequent your web site several times. If they always find the same thing in the same place they will likely get bored and move on giving you a short duration per visit or even worse, no visits at all.
Keeping things fresh is one of the easiest ways to think outside of the box and it is one of the most cost effective things that you can do. All it requires is some planning and a little labor to move things around and you have a fresh site that looks appealing. The cool thing about using this on a web site is that you can change the site deign many times and even tie it in to whatever may be happening in the world. That is a very effective way to stay up to date and exciting. If you play off of current events on your web site people may surf in just to see that you are doing as the world of mouth spreads. This can be a real boon for your numbers and it’s simple to do.