Know when to hold ‘em, know when to open up
I love the niche sites that take a theme and run with it.
Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers is a fun romp through pictures of men with white beards and slightly long grey hair.
As someone who helps run a similar site of windowed snapshots, View From My Window (VFMW), I think the Kenny site could only be helped by opening it up. Make it easy to add a photo, let people rate Kennys, leave comments, and have a way to share one particular Kenny.
One of the great things I’ve noticed on VFMW is how committed the users are to keeping to the theme. If someone uploads a picture that is not obviously through a window, people often ask, “where’s the window?”
Even this picture of a window above a door, which lies pretty close to the theme of the site, gets questions from users: “This picture would even work for a site named ‘view of my window,’” one commenter said.
Visitors help a site. They shape it to their collective vision, which is the point if we want them coming back.