Style Ignite has a great article on 8 tips to remember before designing your next site.

I feel that the most important thing before setting out to build/design a website is to know your niche. It’s very likely that someone else has thought of the same idea before you and has it published on the net already. In fact, it’s highly likely that your niche is polluted with competition. This does not mean that you cannot produce some sort of success. (Just take a look at how many web proxies are out there.) “Knowing your niche” means that you know who the big time players are, the audience they go after, and why they are doing so well.

My CTO mentioned that it seems like there are 75 “web 2.0″ templates out there and people just change the colors and text around for each new site. Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t “designers” harbor their creativity and just make something nice. The rise of flamboyant colors, images, and white space is great for many sites that target the new generation. But how many 30+ people like it? 40+? Have you ever asked someone other than your 18 year old web design buddies? If you take a look at BaseCamp and CentralDesktop’s websites. It’s clear which is more of a simple web 2.0 application, and which is more of an enterprise level application. If you are building a website that targets grandmas who want to organize photos *ahem*, don’t use bright colors. You are just hurting their eyes. Their eyes are tired. They just want to lay down and drink tea and eat the scrumptious crumpets that they baked in the morning.

The next point, is noticing what your competition is doing. Look at their landing pages and product tours. They may not be the very best executions, but their success *might* be attributed to how well their campaigns are converting.

Search Google for some news, comments, reviews, etc on your competition. See what their users are saying. Learn from their mistakes. Find out why people aren’t using their services and figure out how you can capture those users.

Here is a good article titled, Stealing Business Away from your Competition.