Website idea 9: Neighborhood rating service

People often have only a vague idea about different neighborhoods. This is bad especially if you are about to find a new apartment but not exactly sure where. You don’t know beforehand if a certain neighborhood has a high or low crime rate, if there is a good or inadequate public transport, if there is a department store or some other service you constantly need.

There seems to be only few sites that allow visitors to rate and comment neighborhoods, and even those are not very well made. So why don’t you build one, especially as there is so much room for this kind of service. Even the smallest countries and states should have a demand for at least one such site.

Each neighborhood would have a page containing rating and comment section, small overview of a neighborhood (this can be taken directly from Wikipedia), pictures, links, map, local announcement & news section and local discussion board. Also there would be a services section, where users and entrepreneurs could add nearby stores and services with contact information.

This might be a grand scale project but you can start with your own city only. When the popularity of the site grows you can accept other cities as well.

It’s especially neat Google Adsense can direct the ads to a certain area/city because it increases your income.

Website idea 8: Photos of toddlers dressed as cute animals blog

OK, I promised to write about niches that young male geeks seldom take advantage, and therefore have less competition. Here is one: an overly cute blog where people can send photos of their babies dressed as animals. Although this excessively sugared idea almost makes me puke, never forget what we learned from Lolcats: you can make a HUGE amount of money with cute site. Does it really matter if you have to "pray to the porcelain god" a couple of times?

As far as I can see, there isn't a site / blog like the one I just described - at least I couldn't find one. To make this one really successful, I suggest you would make adding the images as easy as possible. Let a PHP resize the pictures, adoring mothers doesn't necessarily know how to do it. It would be also a good idea to write a script that enables people to drag and drop speech balloons over the picture they just uploaded.

The ads could / should be similar than ones on Lolcats. Maybe not the most valuable ones on Internet, but not bad either.

REMINDER: Three useful tools for you websites

Before posting more website ideas I'd like to present a couple of useful tools for webmasters. If you are going to implement any of my ideas you will benefit from these. All three are for free.

http://recaptcha.net/
An easy to use CAPTCHA solution for sites with user generated content. Use it to avoid spam and to slow down problem users. You can also use it to hide your email adress from spam bots.

http://www.statcounter.com/
Track how many people visits your site, where they are from, which link they followed to your site, what pages are they clicking etc.

http://www.addthis.com/
Nowadays social bookmarking is crucial thing to get new visitors to your site. The problem is there are so many services that you will have to spend lots of time to get advantage of them all. Unless, of course, you use AddThis. Just embed a piece of code to your site and your visitors can easily tag your site with their favorite service.

Website idea 2: Shipwreck wiki for divers

Try to google "shipwreck wiki" and you will end up with nothing. That's good thing for you, because now you have a chance to make a profitable website. How could wrecks be profitable? Because of wealthy wreck divers. I dare to say most of the divers would like to dive to wreck. The number of those who actually does it is significant: just google "wreck diving".

You could list information such as the position of a wreck, a history of it, a condition of it, depth, difficulty/danger, how impressive it is and so on.

In the beginning you can get a lots of information from Wikipedia and sites such as http://www.shipwreckcentral.com and http://www.ukdiving.co.uk/wrecks/wreck_list.php. These are needed to attract an initial user group to work on wiki.

You might also want to include underwater airplane wrecks as well. They too have their own fan base.

Type of the site:
Wiki.

Technical difficulty:
Easy, you just need to install free wiki software.

Worth of keywords:
High. Diving equpment and courses are BLOODY expensive, as well as traveling around the world .

Amount of mainteinance needed:
Medium. Some work is required for creating wiki categories, administrating collaborators and so on.

Level of competition
Low. Only couple of shipwreck encyclopedias online, and none of them seems to be on wiki format.

Revenue is created by:
Ads.

Website idea 1: Politician promise archive

Politician & celebrity promise archive is a place where promises made by politicians, athletes, artists etc are stored. Site visitors can search celebrities with a keyword and then see what they have promised and when. Later a possibility to comment and rate promises can be added.

This site is useful as especially politicians sometimes regrettably forget what they have promised. So do they voters I'm afraid.

Adding a promise should be made very easy, with just a text box for a sitation, a box for a source URL and a CAPTCHA field.

Technical difficulty:
Easy, some minor PHP/MySQL needed to get started

Worth of keywords:
Low. There will nevertheless be many celebrity names that might have some value.

Amount of mainteinance needed:
Low. Just add "Report content" button, if someone adds inappropriate or faulty information. There shouldn't be need for registration system, CAPTCHA's are probably enough.

Level of competition
Low. At least a query "promises archive" returns almost nothing relevant.